Catholic Charities homeless, housing case manager shares firsthand experience
Since joining Catholic Charities in Butler seven years ago, Chuck Allen said he regularly sees the difference his work makes firsthand.
“I love when people come back and see me or call me later and tell me about the success story that their life has become,” he said. “A surprising number do come back and tell us what a great help it has been.”
As a homeless and housing case manager for the nonprofit, Allen said he meets with upward of 15 individuals a day to assist with accommodation-related crises.
Sometimes the cases are as straightforward as helping cover a month’s rent or allowing the individual to meet a much-needed car payment or medical bill.
“It could be something far greater than that though,” Allen said. “It could be a case where somebody’s fleeing domestic violence; it could be somebody who is exhibiting obvious signs of substance use, and you have to have a tough conversation about what the next step needs to look like.”
And sometimes, the case is a matter of “financial mismanagement” — Allen’s specialty.
With a master’s degree in business administration, Allen said he can “key in pretty quickly” on the source of an individual’s financial woes.
“It may just be a matter of shifting things around, re-prioritizing and not continuing down the same path that’s not working,” he said. “It may mean shifting paths entirely, shifting jobs.”
After previously owning a “sizable company,” Allen said it was a shift in his own path that brought him to work with Catholic Charities — tackling a second master’s degree in addiction counseling following the Great Recession in 2007.
“I just decided to shift entirely into something that was more of an interest to me,” he said. “It’s no secret that I’m in recovery myself, so pursuing a second master’s in that field appealed to me.”
Recovering from alcohol addiction, Allen said his experiences have made him “sympathetic” to the cases that come through his office.
“It’s something that I will sometimes bring up before it’s brought up to me by a client,” he said. “If I see some obvious signs, I’ll say, ‘Let’s have an honest conversation here. I’ll be straight with you; you be straight with me.”
His firsthand experience — such as utilizing an electric bike while he was without a driver’s license for eight years — is regularly an eye-opener for clients who feel stuck and without options, according to Allen.
“Seemingly small things like that can have a big impact,” he said, “and kind of broaden the scope of what seems possible.”
And while the organization cannot force clients to seek the help they need, Allen said Catholic Charities is “the first point of contact for homelessness and housing issues in Butler.”
“Probably the most beneficial thing that I have done, sort of inadvertently, in the seven years that I’ve been here is established relationships with the other agencies,” he said, “to where I know who to call — and can call — for additional perspectives or other types of resources that they may have.”
According to Allen, the organization’s partners include the Center for Community Resources, Glade Run Lutheran Services, Robin’s Home and the Lighthouse Foundation.
Allen himself is a resident manager at Johnny’s Place, a sober-living home for men operated by the Lighthouse Foundation.
And with a significant increase in cases at the center and in the county since the pandemic, according to Allen, this partnership of nonprofits in the community has proven invaluable.
He also praised the commitment of the staff at Catholic Charities and the partnering agencies as a whole.
“We all have our niche, but we all work quite well together too,” he said. “That’s a testament to the dedication that all of these agencies have and the people within them possess.”
