Jermaine

Staff Q&A with Jermaine Pope

Jermaine is the Director of The Villa, Project Renewal’s only permanent supportive housing program geared specifically toward individuals living with mental health diagnoses and who have histories of substance use. Since taking the helm of the program in 2023, Jermaine has focused on increasing his team’s one-on-one engagement with residents in order to really understand their unique needs and goals. 

Jermaine’s door is always open for people to talk to him about anything and everything–and they do! This simple act of listening has helped tenants feel seen, and promoted a culture of camaraderie and care at The Villa.

In the conversation below, Jermaine shares the importance of supporting tenant independence and reflects on how the residents and staff are building a vibrant and thriving community.

Tell us a little bit about your work at The Villa.

The Villa is permanent supportive housing for tenants with a history of long term homelessness, substance use, and mental health diagnoses. So this is a very unique group of individuals that have a very unique set of circumstances and issues that they need to live with every day. Our job is to help them with the issues that they may have in terms of substance use or mental health, and then get them on the road to living their lives every day. We’re not just here to make sure people have housing, we’re here to care for the whole scope of who they are.

So that looks like making sure that they eat, have clean clothes, are in supportive programs, they’re in job training, and anything else that they might be interested in, while also keeping their independence as tenants. People use the word “clients” a lot, or “consumer,” but at The Villa we call them tenants. Just to remind ourselves, hey, they are here as permanent residents. They live in their units permanently. They pay rent, they pay their own bills. And we’re here to support their independence. 

How do you build community at The Villa?

Our ninth floor is the community area where we have a bunch of games, a tv, and a pool table. This is where we hold our community events and our OT and case management groups. We’ve done parties for Halloween, we’ve done Thanksgiving, we’ve done Christmas, we’ve done Super Bowl, and we’re doing game tournaments every Friday. So there are a lot of opportunities for people to engage with each other.

In the last year, as we’ve been working to engage tenants more one-on-one and really address their specific needs, we’ve been getting a lot more attendance for these groups because the tenants feel a little bit more involved, and I think they feel more free and independent. So they’ve started to expand their thought process on what their lives can be at Villa. At our last community dinner we had 43 out of 53 tenants come out and everybody was just having a great time. We were all sitting together at this long giant table filled with food that tenants and staff had cooked for each other. It felt like family; it felt like fun. 

Can you give us an example of a tenant success story?

When I came to the Villa, there was a group of guys who had been pretty violent previously. And they’re now the group that’s kind of like the leaders, they’re the group that wants to keep everybody in line and make sure there’s participation in the groups and playing games and playing Spades tournaments. Instead of creating conflict, they’re helping people connect.

To give you an example, there was an incident where someone said something to someone’s girlfriend. This happens, you know, you say something to my lady, I’m gonna come to your face, and I’m gonna tell you about yourself. And usually, that would have ended in a fight. But they had a discussion. And the guys who used to be the violent guys were like, “No, no, no, it’s cool. You guys could talk about it. But hey, no fighting, don’t hit each other. Let’s not escalate this.” So they calmed that down themselves. They didn’t engage with the front desk. They didn’t call the case manager. They didn’t call me in or call the clinical coordinator. They just diffused it right away. And then let us know on the backend. It was very cool because that’s the kind of independence we’re working with them to build.

There’s several stories that I can tell you but I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re success stories. I just feel like you naturally see the change in human beings, as they’re given the avenue just to be themselves and to let their personalities shine and their lives grow.