MEET ZAC HERONEMUS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF AURORA

By Michael L. Smith, Jr.

Staff Writer For The City-County Observer

This week I had the opportunity to speak with Zac Heronemus, the Executive Director of the non-profit organization Aurora, Inc. about their work helping those in our community who are experiencing homelessness, as well as Aurora’s upcoming special event on 11/18, “The Homeless Experience Project: 48 Hours in the Life”.

QUESTION: Tell Us About Yourself And Your Organization

My name is Zac Heronemus, and I’ve been with Aurora, Inc. as Executive Director since January 20^th of 2020, right before Covid hit. Prior to that, I served on the Board for about 2 years and 4 months. I’ve been working in the public service sector for pretty much my whole adult life, both in government and non-profits.

At Aurora, we are the lead homeless services agency in the city of Evansville, and what that means is we leverage housing programs that no other organization in the community really has access to. We partner with the federal government, the state of Indiana, the city of Evansville, United Way, and various corporate partners to carry out our programs and provide case management. We focus on housing plans, income plans, and restorative life plans that provide wrap-around services for those men, women, children, and seniors who are experiencing homelessness. 

Our primary focus is stabilization from the onset and depending on what the individual or family’s needs are in the assessment, we will provide navigation and convening of services. Whether that is help with mental health, substance abuse, job skills, financial literacy, the possibilities are endless. When it comes down to our work, a lot of our success is really a byproduct of our professionally trained social workers who manage all our client’s cases, network with them, and convene the services that not only help to restore lives but ensure greater success and likelihood that we won’t see the same people experiencing homelessness again.

QUESTION: How Has The Pandemic Impacted You And Your Organization?

It affected us in a few different ways. The first was obvious, revenue. We had to cancel all our events and people were a lot more reluctant to spend or give their money for social services. Not only was Aurora impacted but the whole non-profit community was significantly impacted in that manner as well. So, we weren’t unique in that aspect, but I can tell you that there’s likely no more essential a service than Aurora regarding helping the most vulnerable people in the community, and those are the people who don’t have housing, the people that are in shelters or on the street. When you think about those in shelters or in congregate settings, the likelihood that you could catch Covid-19 would significantly increase. So, we focused on two things to really ramp up the services we provided. 

First, we were able to leverage around 1.5 million dollars to keep about 370 households, both individuals and families, from experiencing homelessness by not being evicted. We have been able to carry that out from October 2020 to the present. Second, we played a strong role in a partnership with Mayor Winnecke’s Commission on Homelessness, the Catholic Diocese of Evansville, Echo Housing, Deaconess Hospital, and St. Vincent Ascension, alongside the Rescue Mission and all our shelter partners. That partnership’s focus was to isolate individuals that were either suspected to be or confirmed as Covid positive from those congregate settings. We did that initially at the Sarto Center with the Diocese where we worked through a model for about three months, then we moved into a hybrid model where individuals either suspected to be or confirmed as Covid positive in the shelters or in one of our supportive housing facilities could be quarantined in hotel rooms where we could convene services through our outreach teams. 

The other way Covid affected us, and one of the biggest things for us internally, was developing very strict Covid protocols that we still follow to this day. Largely in part because we don’t just see clients at Aurora, we meet them where they are, whether that be in shelters or on the street. We want to be as careful as possible internally with our protocols and policies to ensure that not only are we avoiding contracting Covid rampantly through our own organization, impacting our staff and our families, but we are also avoiding spreading it to the people and the families we are trying to help when we go to work.

QUESTION: What Brought You To Aurora? 

I’ve always had a public service mentality since I was very young. Part of that was I had a father who was in the military. He spent 25 years in the Army, and while his military service played a role in me wanting to be service orientated, most importantly was the fact that he involved me in a lot of different activities and volunteer opportunities almost everywhere we lived. Whether that was with United Way, the Salvation Army, or pancake days with Lion’s Club, whatever it might be.

My political science background has also kept me interested in social issues and social services, and I continued to further my education with my Master’s degree in Public Administration, with a dual emphasis on government and non-profit administrations. 

QUESTION: What Motivates You To Help The Homeless?

I think the positive results, results are always good to see. We’ve had great successes, but we’ve also had some failures as well. It’s tough, it’s tough to work working in homeless services. Most importantly though, to me, is the people in general. One of our core beliefs at Aurora is everybody has value. Tackling the common stereotypes and the significant misconceptions about the reasons why people are experiencing homelessness is part of the job we must do to raise awareness. A lot of people don’t realize that you can be living a relatively stable or middle- to the upper-class type of life, and suddenly a series of significant events cause things to spiral out of control, and before you know it you can find yourself homeless. It’s not just people with mental health issues or substance abuse issues that Aurora sees, it runs the gamut of backgrounds and reasons as to why people end up in that situation. Part of our job is establishing that pathway to self-sufficiency, to being stabilized and getting back on your own two feet, which varies just as greatly as the reasons one might experience homelessness.

QUESTION: Why Should The Community Care About Homeless Issues You’re Addressing?

Once someone becomes entrenched in the homeless experience, the means of getting out are very difficult to come by on your own. In this circumstance the idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s difficult, because a lot of the things that we take for granted like having an I.D., having a birth certificate, having a social security card, are all staples to signing a lease, getting a job, and everything else that comes about with trying to better position yourself financially for yourself and your family. So, I think any community that wants to take care of itself, should always think about those people who are most vulnerable, those people who need a hand up not a handout. It’s the whole premise that when you lift those that are less fortunate, it lifts everyone in the community. Something many people lose sight of is the fact that no one has been able to achieve anything in their lives, good, bad, indifferent, without having somebody in their life that helped them achieve that. Whether it’s your parents, your teachers, a mentor, a family member, your neighbor, or social service organizations like Aurora.

Also, to put it in perspective, Evansville has the highest per capita rate of homelessness in our state, basically year in and year out. According to our 2020 count, and I’m using that data point because 2021 was skewed due to Covid, we had about 488 people that were identified as either in a shelter or on street in Evansville. During the same period, Indianapolis had around 1500 identified as homeless. So, we are talking about three and a half times the amount of people experiencing homelessness in Indianapolis than in Evansville, but Indianapolis has about seven to eight times the population.

QUESTION: Can you share a little about the upcoming event “The Homeless Experience Project: 48 Hours in the Life”?

Of course, so, one of the other byproducts of Covid was us evaluating what we were doing at Aurora from a special events standpoint. We looked at the Gingerbread Competition, which was about 17 or 18 years in running. The event was a lot of work for a little bit of return, probably around nine- or ten months’ worth of work that staff, board members, and volunteers would have to carry out. So, we got to thinking about what it is we could do to really do a greater job of raising awareness. When I was at United Way, I did an 8-hour simulation of homelessness with a previous Executive Director and some young Leaders United members from the United Way Young Professionals group, and when I was going through that, it was very enlightening. I found out that, being born abroad, how difficult a task it would be if I was homeless and didn’t have those key documents I previously mentioned. It would be a minimum of two months before I would have been able to get my birth certificate, which would start the journey of getting my social security card and my I.D., then to hopefully find a house and a job and all the challenges that come with that. It was very enlightening to get immersed in it, and see how the whole network works, how the soup kitchens work, how Aurora starts the onset of case management, and even all the non-service-related things like the public amenities aspect, such as how difficult it is to facilitate and navigate the Mets bus system, access to public bathrooms, etc.

So that’s really where the idea for “The Homeless Experience Project” was born, and originally it was only going to be 24 hours, but then we thought to ourselves that anybody could likely do 24 hours, so we decided to push the envelope and kind of up the ante to 48 hours. Fortunately, we have had some community leaders step up and join us in this effort. Mayor Winnecke being one of them, State Representative Hatfield, Wayne Hart our local meteorologist is participating, Jaimie Sheth of the JD Sheth Foundation, Lisa Vaughan with Feed Evansville, I even have my Board President and other Board members participating. Not only are all these people participating, but they are helping raise funds on our behalf as part of the experience. They are going to spend 48 hours on the streets of Evansville, and ideally, we want to immerse people in it to, one, help raise awareness on the topic, and two, create super advocates not just for the work we do but most importantly the people that we serve in our community. Obviously one of the other main reasons is to raise funds, to help us continue to do what we do best, which is case management, housing plans, income plans, and convening those wrap-around services for those experiencing homelessness. 

The project is starting at 12 p.m. on Thursday, November 18^th, and we will all reconvene at Aurora at 12 p.m. on Saturday, November 20^th to sort of debriefing and talk about the experience. All the participants will have a series of challenges and scenarios to navigate during the 48 hours. Part of it is going to be navigating those challenges on its own, and part of it will be navigating them with Aurora. It will be as real life as we can make it, but we don’t kid ourselves in thinking that it will encapsulate the totality of the homeless experience. Hopefully, the byproduct of this is that we can identify potential gaps in our community or services, or improvements that can be made, not just at Aurora but as a collective network of social service agencies. Maybe we will even be able to open some new doors for partnerships that will help us be a greater success in our work and see us move the needle a greater amount for the over 400 men, women, children, and seniors who are experiencing homelessness in our community.

QUESTION: What Can Our Community Do To Support Aurora?

They can help fund programs like Aurora or other social service providers that help restore the lives of people in the community. Be greater advocates for the people that we serve and realize that those individuals and families are people just like yourself. Be an advocate for greater public policy that addresses this issue, be an advocate for the social services network that we have here in our community. Being a champion of affordable housing, affordable housing is a huge roadblock for us and our work, because we have certain criteria and fair-market rent is one of the criteria we need to meet to house people. Unfortunately, that market is continuing to shrink. So, advocate for the people, advocate for public policy, advocate for housing. Support helps us make sure we have professionals there to do this important work, today and tomorrow and into the future.

Footnote:   Zac Heronemus is also Evansville’s 3^rd Ward City Councilor and the Executive Director of the non-profit organization Aurora, Inc. He is an alumnus of the University of Southern Indiana where he earned his Master’s degree in Public Administration.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing homelessness and need access to help/resources, you can contact Aurora, Inc. at (812) 428-3246 or info@auroraevansville.org

Michael L. Smith, Jr is a profile writer for The City-County Observer and is currently completing classes at Ivy Tech Community College and in pursuit of a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism. 

If you know someone who deserves to have a spotlight shined on their contributions to the community, please email the author at msmith1221@ivytech.edu