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Palm Healthcare Foundation:
$25,000 awarded to St. Ann Place

Palm Beach Post

Palm Healthcare Foundation has awarded $25,000 to St. Ann Church Community Services to implement a hygiene program at its St. Ann Place in West Palm Beach.

St. Ann Place was purchased by the Catholic Diocese of Palm Beach to provide a variety of services to homeless people. The hygiene program will provide bathrooms with showers, dressing rooms and a laundry room.

Palm Healthcare Foundation is an independent foundation that funds healthcare programs and healthcare education programs in Palm Beach County.

St. Ann Place offers meals, showers and dignity to homeless

By Emily Minor, Palm Beach Post Staff Columnist

It started like this: A few of the local homeless would poke their heads into the office at St. Ann Catholic Church in downtown West Palm Beach and the secretary would say "Go see the sisters" and they did. And before she knew it, Sister Carleen Cekal was making 10 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then 20. Then 30.

"Finally I said, we can't keep this up," Cekal says.

And that's when they started looking for a real place, with a waiting room, kitchen, laundry room and showers.

They found it last year, on a stretch of Dixie Highway north of Good Samaritan Medical Center and south of the Northwood neighborhood. The diocese bought the building, fixed it up, and they opened in November. And since then, the Catholic sisters, who are members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, have been there six days a week, giving out food, clean laundry, bus passes.

And dignity. St. Ann Place is big on dignity.

"It's been an amazing journey," Cekal says.

Still lack somewhere to sleep at night

St. Ann Place isn't a cure-all for the homeless. The people who come here, men and women alike, still have no real place to sleep at night -- except the streets. That's a problem, a huge problem, even this place can't fix.

And the sheer number of people walking through the front door can be overwhelming. Wednesday, the waiting room was packed. The center doesn't open until 9:30 a.m. but people start lining up around 8.

"Sometimes you just don't know what to do except bring it to prayer," Cekal says.

But last month alone, St. Ann Place gave out 2,498 bag lunches, up from 1,400 in November. Victoria and Lawrence Letorney of Palm Beach Gardens, who used to be parishioners at St. Ann before they moved to Palm Beach Gardens, volunteer at the sack-lunch counter, which opens at 10 a.m. "They're out there at 9 o'clock waiting to eat," he says.

When she started this project, the first thing Cekal had to do was persuade outsiders that a place like Palm Beach County had a homeless problem. "People were like, 'Oh yeah, Palm Beach,' " she says. The next thing? This new center, wherever it was, whatever it offered, had to have showers. "Even if they get a job, they can't stay clean long enough to keep it," she says. And since Cekal had never worked with the homeless before, she trusted her gut on what to offer.

There's a telephone for local calls. There's an office and a nice volunteer who gives out bus passes so people can get around. There's a laundry room, where you can drop off your dirty belongings and pick them up clean. And there are showers. T.C. Delle, 42, who says he sleeps in a park at night, said it didn't take him long to find help here. "When I got off the Greyhound bus, they told me where to come," he said.

"They don't need cellphones," Cekal says with a laugh. "They've got the best communications system."

In May alone, more than 530 people came in for showers, and 373 had their laundry done. Another 406 got bus passes.

'We want to be good neighbors'

Of course, you don't open a center like this without a few grumbles. The neighbors along this mostly commercial stretch of Dixie complained about people lingering outside the center's door, at 2107 N. Dixie. Cekal plans to open a small, shady patio in the back where clients can wait. They also hired someone to pick up trash.

"We want to be good neighbors," she says. And with next year's budget around $120,000, they also plan to hire a security guard and bring on a nurse practitioner so "we can start meeting some of their health-care needs." The center operates on grants and donations.

"So many of these people are absolutely delightful," Cekal says. "I feel like they're my friends."