Last modified: Sunday, March 11, 2007 12:22 AM EST Norton resident John Yazwinski, executive director of Father Bills Place, sits in a dorm room at the homeless shelter in Quincy. (Staff photo by MIKE GEORGE) Norton man runs large South Shore homeless shelter BY REBECCA KEISTER / SUN CHRONICLE STAFF QUINCY -- It wasn't suppose to be this way. When he was in school, getting a business degree, John Yazwinski imagined his future and saw himself behind a desk at a big-name company. But scholarship work put him face to face with the state's homelessness problems, and the way it was suppose to be turned into, for him, the way it seemed meant to be. "I fell in love with working where every day I had an impact on people's lives," Yazwinski, 34, said. "I got to see how I could bring my skills in. I fell in love with not only managing the homeless, but with helping to end it." And so it happened that he found his way to running Father Bill's Place, a Quincy-based system of shelters, and now residential housing units, that began in the basement of a neighborhood church over 20 years ago. The shelter's namesake, The Rev. William McCarthy, has heralded a personal fight against homelessness on the South Shore since then, recently being honored with an 80th birthday-55th anniversary in the priesthood gala. Yazwinski, a Norton resident, started working there 10 years ago. He became the nonprofit's executive director in 1999. Since then, he's been working on the organization's Housing First initiative, which gives chronically homeless residents the chance to start over in a home of their own. The idea, which Yazwinski said was based on feedback from shelter guests, is that residents who achieve a stable living environment will be better equipped to stabilize the other areas of their life, including work, health and personal relationships, and will sooner be on the path to eradicating their homelessness. "We've seen so many different types of people fall into homelessness," Yazwinski said. "Father Bill's is about ending the problem." Housing First took its first major step in spring 2005, when 12 women, frequent guests of Father Bill's place, who each had a long history of homelessness, were moved into their own rooms in the organization's first block of units. Back then, Yazwinski said, 10 of those women had no income. Today, they all do. It's also a success to say that just one year before they moved in, those same women made 22 emergency room visits and had 44 days as inpatients at area hospitals. In their first year of residence, they saw the ER just 11 times, and had four in-patient stays. "Quincy Medical Center said we saved them $60,000," Yazwinski said. "We can save taxpayers' money. These women were struggling with primary care issues; our toughest customer in a sense. (The state) use to make people jump through a lot of steps to get into housing. If we give them housing, they can start putting their life back together." In less than than two years, with Yazwinski's help, the program has grown into 210 housing units, spread out over the South Shore. Two weeks ago, a Weymouth family whose house burned down was placed in a unit, rent free, after their two nights at a hotel provided by the Red Cross would have left them displaced. The ultimate goal, of course, is for Yazwinski to be out of a job, in a sense; the goal is to not need places like Father Bill's anymore. "It's got to be about us all working together on these issues," Yazwinski said. "We know that these places are operated by people who do want to take the sign down." There are still the shelters, and overseeing their operations also falls on Yazwinski's shoulders. Most shelter guests temporary Most of the shelter guests are temporary, using Father Bill's as an emergency and transitional stop, but Yazwinski said that "20 to 25 percent of the population are chronically homeless." The shelter's above-capacity usual 105 beds are always full, with backpacks, suitcases and plastic bags filling the beds during the day, before guest return to check in for the night. Since he stopped working daily at the shelter, moving into the organization's administrative offices, his contact with guests isn't as frequent. But he comes back about once a week, and the guests still know him by name. These days, there's a large homeless population in the 18- to 24-year-old age group, kids who have been aged out of foster care, women fleeing domestic violence, and those with emotional and mental illnesses with nowhere else to go. "As long as I've worked here, I've seen (guests) come and go. So when we moved the women into houses, it wasn't about a number. It was about a person we've known for 10 years," Yazwinski said. "If I was in an organization that was just trying to place people in a bed, it would be more draining. Here, you see miracles happen everyday." REBECCA KEISTER can be reached at 508-236-0336 or at rkeister@thesunchronicle.com.