With temperatures in the low 20s, Dantrell Meekins hunted for spent cigarettes around the base of the world’s largest loon statue at Snelling and University avenues, and then the Snelling Avenue Green Line station, and then the Hamline Avenue Green Line station, and then the Lexington Parkway station.
His was no act of desperation — Meekins, 31, a recent hire of the Listening House “Work Now” program, is one of more than 100 clients of the drop-in day shelter who keep busy keeping St. Paul clean, traveling around downtown streets and then up and down the light-rail corridor picking up litter.
“At $20 per hour, you can’t beat it,” said Meekins, talking up the program excitedly to a bystander sucking on a cigar at the Snelling Avenue transit station shortly after 10 a.m. on a recent Wednesday.
Meekins later explained how he followed a pregnant girlfriend from Chicago to St. Paul, staying in a downtown shelter for roughly two years before renting his own Cathedral Hill apartment. For folks living on the street or dropping in and out of homelessness, “we need the money. I’m just grateful for the time out here,” he said, lamenting the cost of living. “You know prices went up.”
Launched in 2024
The Listening House Work Now program launched in early 2024 with enough pandemic relief funding from St. Paul and Ramsey County to keep it afloat for about two years, offering each recruit — some of them in their 60s and 70s — $20 per hour to participate up to two shifts per week. Since then, the initiative has expanded from picking up on the streets near the day shelter’s new East Seventh Street hub at the edge of downtown St. Paul to 11 light-rail stations, employing more than 120 participants over the past year.
Rotating crews of 14 workers go out twice daily, up to five days per week, traveling as far as Snelling Avenue with buckets, work gloves and portable trash grabbers in hand. Each worker has completed an onboarding process, with about half of them having needed help securing necessary work documents and other key paperwork to ensure they’re prepared for housing and future employment as they become available.
Among the group on the wintry Wednesday morning was David Drake Jr., 66, a stout man who would repeat the story of how he was born in Hawaii, named after his father and came to Minnesota as a child to anyone who will listen. Drake, among the slowest moving of the group, also was among the chattiest, armed with joke after joke and riddle after riddle, as well as a more harrowing tale of having to resolve an old warrant charge he didn’t know he had before he could join the program.
In Work Now, he’s found some patient mentors.
“This gentleman here is one of the nicest guys I ever worked around, or with,” said Drake, pointing to supervisor Johnny Griffin as the workers approached the Robert Street transit station.
Record homelessness
Walking along downtown Seventh Street with an eye on his crew, Griffin estimated that 90% of participants have no permanent address, with some staying at the downtown St. Paul Higher Ground/Dorothy Day shelter or transitional housing. “Some of them sleep under bridges right now,” he said.
After a snowfall and stark temperature drop in early December, Griffin expected few workers to show up for a morning roll call, but almost everyone scheduled was there.
“You’ve got to understand,” he recalled one of the participants telling him, “some of us sleep outside during the harshest of times.”
Even with just two shifts per week, and against a wintry backdrop, low-barrier employment in a supportive work environment has been a morale booster for many who are down on their luck or have had brushes with the law. Some have had trouble getting jobs because of criminal incidents decades in their past. Work Now has been a good match a time when the city needs their services, said a participant who identified herself only as Miss Bell, formerly of Chicago.
To her disappointment, she said, Green Line stations her Work Now crew have cleaned sometimes get wrapped with litter shortly afterward, leaving her marveling at light-rail users who don’t think twice about dropping a wrapper on the ground. “I (want to) say something,” said Bell, 57, hunting for detritus as the crew walked the Capitol/Rice Street Green Line station. “And then I’m like no, I better not.”
The workers acknowledged that key segments of downtown St. Paul and the light-rail corridor suffered a visible uptick in litter and neglect during the pandemic, problems that have continued in the era of remote work, which has taken many watchful eyes off downtown streets. Meanwhile, housing costs and the fentanyl crisis have pushed many residents outdoors.
‘We’re a team’
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development counted a record 771,000 people homeless across the country on a single night last year, the highest number documented since HUD’s official “Point in Time” survey began in 2007. The number is likely a huge undercount, and couch-hoppers moving from friend’s home to friend’s home were not included in the tally.
Griffin, who has worked with homeless populations for more than 20 years through programs like Listening House and Catholic Charities, said it’s been refreshing to see the recruits treated as part of the solution rather than just as aspects of a problem to be solved.
“We’re always getting honks and waves,” he said, noting that Work Now participants will sometimes pick up trash from private parking lots and storefronts they pass in their travels. Business owners, in exchange, have taken to offering them bathroom access.
Griffin, who likes to wax philosophic, offered life lessons as the crew marched toward a transit station: “We’re a team, we move as one, but you’re also an individual — you’re your own lead.”
Seeking funders
Their resilience has made some of the Listening House visitors attractive prospects for private employers, and 24 Work Now participants to date have received reference letters as they attempt to land steadier jobs. Ten have moved on to new employment.
Still, plenty of the Work Now recruits come with baggage, from unresolved criminal warrants to a lack of a permanent mailing address. As they attempt to get those and other issues resolved, organizers are direct in their approach and have no illusions about the population they’re employing. Show up inebriated and your shift is done for the day before it even started.
The next challenge will be finding funding to keep the program afloat past next August.
Using federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars, the city of St. Paul and Ramsey County worked together in late 2023 to put $750,000 together and fund the Work Now program for a nearly two-year stretch, which is about half over. The first year of the program cost about $391,000 to launch, with $238,000 paid directly to 126 active participants, according to a spokesperson for Ramsey County.
Funding has also covered a coordinator and supplies, and been put toward obtaining records, clearing warrants and steering participants toward housing and employment.
Mary Margaret Reagan Montiel, Listening House director of operations, said the city and county are working with Listening House on a “sustainability plan” aimed at keeping Work Now around for the foreseeable future.
The hope is that other businesses and municipalities will pay Listening House for their services. Metro Transit, for instance, benefits from the cleanup but is not yet a funding partner.
Montiel said the biggest benefits for participants have been the practical ones — “money in their pockets, confidence to continue on their journey, job experience to highlight when searching for a full-time job, the knowledge of what’s on their background check reports, and most of all, the community they have built with their co-workers and Listening House. Our teams are contributing members of the St. Paul community helping to keep our neighborhoods clean of litter.”
Walking along Robert Street on his way to clean a light-rail station, Tyrone Mitchell was hopeful the program could continue.
“We’re making a difference,” said Mitchell, 49. “We come out every day and do what we can do.”
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