Timmie Parker sat with one leg tucked under her at her desk. As the stress of the morning increased, she had shoved her long blond hair into a rubber band, and by noon there were four pencils and a pen stuck through it. She wore a clean but wrinkled plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, over a tank top, torn jeans, and high-top Converse, and no makeup. She had the tall, lean, elegant frame of her father. She was six feet tall in bare feet, twenty-nine years old, and had a master's in social work from Columbia. She was currently working for a foundation whose mission was to find free or low-cost housing for eligible members of the homeless population of New York, and she'd been at her desk since six o'clock that morning trying to catch up on work. There was a mountain of files on her desk. And she would have liked to find a place to live for every single one, and knew that if she was lucky and continued pounding on government agencies and other resources they used, she'd find a home for one or two who were eligible. The word "eligible" was used as a catch-all phrase to filter out all those who needed it most.
It was a sweltering July day, and as usual her air conditioner wasn't working. She could already tell it was going to be one of those days where nothing worked quite the way she wanted it to, and she'd be delivering bad news to some of her most desperate clients. Heartbreak was her stock in trade. She lived in a permanent state of outrage over the injustices in the system, and how ineffective it was to help her clients. Helping the homeless had been her passion since her teens. She was a dedicated and deeply caring though often angry person. Her tirades over social issues at the dinner table in her youth had been frequent. And she had spent all the years since trying to do something about it. Above all, Timmie Parker wasn't a quitter—she worked tirelessly for those she served. And once she found them housing, she stuck with them. Once they were isolated in tiny government-owned efficiency apartments, without the support system they had come to rely on in the streets, loneliness, despair, and suicide became serious risks.
Timmie had a hundred great ideas about how to make things work better, but there was never enough money or support teams. Poverty programs had been slashed in the economic crisis, private foundation funds were dwindling, too, and no one in government would listen. Timmie felt like she was emptying the ocean with a thimble, as she watched her clients slip through the cracks, waiting a year or more to enter free detox programs or qualify for a place to live. The women fared worse than the men on the streets and were often victims of violent crimes in shelters. She faced miles of red tape every day, trying to help people fill out forms for disability benefits or ID cards.