Counseling will form an integral part of Fels' plan, with a trained therapist visiting the shelter three or four nights a week.
"You can't tell some one they have to get counseling," Fels says, emphasizing the homeless person's right to choose or refuse counseling. "On the other hand, what you can do is provide them an atmosphere that is safe enough for them to deal with this stuff if they want to."
While psychological issues often contribute to homelessness, it is the randomness of homelessness that has impressed Fels most in her eight years of community service.
Fels talks with intensity about the ordinary people she has met whose medical bills forced them to lose their homes, and the young people who had no real home to begin with.
"There's a whole segment of the population out there who aren't homeless, but they sure as hell don't have a home," Fels says. "They're people who run around from friend to friend, from relative to relative and crash on people's couches. And then those supports may give out."
The full force of what happens when those supports do give out struck Fels when she met a young woman at University Lutheran whom Fels feels is much like herself.
"There's this woman, this 18 year old woman..." Fels says. "She's so much like me...She looks like me when I was 18...I think about her a lot."
Fels, like Baliga, envisions drawing support and volunteers from universities. Her shelter will be affiliated with Phillips Brooks House for tax purposes, and will be staffed primarily by volunteers from Harvard, Wellesley, MIT and Tufts.
Fels hopes to model the leadership of her shelter after Unilu. Fels says she wants other students to take over her shelter after she completes her year, just as the directorship of UniLu passes from one generation of students to the next.
Funding
If both Baliga and Fels could have one wish--short of the instant solution of violence and homelessness--both say they would ask for more money for their projects.
While the Stride Rite grant provides living expenses so graduates can work full time on public service, it does not endow the project. Fels expects her $15,000 to cover her personal expenses, but she will spend the summer lobbying the federal and local government, and private donors, for more funding.
Baliga finds herself in a tighter situation, as the $10,000 Pforzheimer grant must fund both Baliga's living expenses and the hotline. Baliga says she expects the money to last about nine months, and is counting on state funds and private contributions to sustain her project.
But if either woman were offered a lucrative job with an assured future, there's no doubt they'd refuse. After all, it is an option they could have pursued. To Baliga, the choice was clear. "Hey, there's something wrong," she says--and she wants to fix it.
Fels also says she couldn't escape her instincts. "I guess it's just sort of a