Sophie Cares for the Homeless

This young lady couldn’t stop giggling during her health check-up by Sophie

As a Nurse Practitioner, Sophie cares for homeless individuals in New York City in her own special way. She started working at Care for the Homeless only two months after graduating from Yale University with her Master’s Degree in Nursing as a Family Nurse Practitioner. Sophie is originally from Portland, Oregon. She received her bachelor’s from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California in 2013 and moved to New York City in 2014 when she started her studies at Yale. Sophie says her mentors at Yale referred her to Care for the Homeless (CFH), where she now practices medicine at two CFH health centers, one in Queens and the other in the Bronx. She enjoys working at CFH because she is always “learning from [her] patients.” She says coming from Oregon to living in New York and working at CFH, she learned a lot about the challenges the city brings and the “incredible resilience” that is needed to live in NYC, especially as someone experiencing homelessness. “I am always inspired by my patients,” Sophie said. “Seeing how strong they are makes me want to fight harder for them by helping them move into a better phase in life,” she continued. Sophie uses these emotions to motivate her to work as hard as she can towards solutions to help her patients who frequently have chronic health conditions, “ranging from Autism to Hypertension (abnormally high blood pressure).”

Sophie gives an exam to a young boy and his mother

“I don’t know if it is a New York thing or if CFH is just good at bringing like-minded people together, but everyone in this organization fights hard for every client and it is apparent in every person who works here,” Sophie said. An experience that sticks out the most to her is when she encountered a 17-year-old patient who saw her for a physical. She says the patient didn’t want the physical and didn’t think he needed it. He was closed off in the beginning with short, one-word responses. “You can tell he was the kind of kid that no one gave much time to,” and that he is the type of kid that people are likely to make negative assumptions about, said Sophie. She continued to talk to him and made a breakthrough when she asked him about college.  He said he wanted to go to school in LA, Sophie went to school in the same city. She told him she went to Occidental and the patient looked at her in shock because that’s where he wanted to go to school too. He opened up to her and she offered to write him a letter of recommendation as well as help him with anything else he may need to get into the college. Sophie says it was “one of those moments” where she didn’t do anything miraculous for a patient’s health, but she was able to make a difference in a patient’s life in a very rewarding but unexpected way.

Sophie and one of her frequent patients, 2-year-old Oliver

She hears similar stories from her patients about homelessness. She said most of her patients were doing the best that they could, working two jobs, minimum wage or working a regular job and living paycheck to paycheck when “one thing happens.” “Either a car accident where they lost the ability to go to work and their job fired them or a death of the primary ‘provider’ in the family,” she said. “One incident happens where they find themselves unable to pay rent and next thing you know they are homeless. It’s almost never a series of events where homelessness could have been avoided. All it takes is one or two unfortunate events and now you’ve landed in this difficult situation that is monumentally hard to get out of,” she continued.

Sophie wants people to understand that homelessness does not speak to anyone’s character. She says “there are so many things that we, who have resources, can do to help this.” With your support, people who are experiencing homelessness will continue to receive care from skilled and caring providers such as Sophie. Your gift today can change a life and make a difference.  Thank you!