Finding dignity for homeless elders

Anna Bissonnette has worked decades to help elders get out of homeless shelters. (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)

"It takes an average of two weeks for a person to be totally demoralized and institutionalized into homelessness," said Anna Bissonnette.

Bissonnette, who spent nearly two decades as a nurse at Boston University Medical Center, was first exposed to what she sees as a common precursor to homelessness in the 1950s while working at the Little Company of Mary Hospital in East Cambridge, which cared for patients with chronic diseases, until it closed in 1959.

She and the staff regularly encountered people who arrived with no hope to live and watched them convalesce. But when it came time to leave, Bissonnette said, the steep hospital fees had emptied their savings, leaving them unable to afford a home.

"In order to be admitted into a chronic care hospital, you had to lower your assets, which often meant giving up your home," said Bissonnette, 76, who lives in Waltham. "We didn't have Medicare or Medicaid back then, so you had to use your Social Security."

Disgusted and determined, Bissonnette decided to pursue a graduate degree in public health in the hope of enabling elders, and those with disabilities, to remain at home. She graduated from Boston University and was asked to stay on to teach gerontology and public health.

While teaching in the medical school, Bissonnette coordinated nursing students to work with the medical students from Boston City Hospital and University Hospital (which later merged to form the Boston Medical Center) to make house calls in the South End, a program that still exists.

"The medical students were finding their patients in the throes of eviction," said Bissonnette. "They were being told by their landlords that they had to move because the houses were being bought up by the young professionals who wanted to live in the South End."

Bissonnette became a catalyst in founding a transitional housing program at Boston University called Elders Living at Home. It began in 1986 with a three-year grant from approximately 13 national and local organizations.

"We got apartments from the Boston Housing Authority that weren't being rented, took care of the patients medically, got them onto disability, and began looking for permanent housing," said Bissonnette.

During the past 20 years, the Elders Living at Home program has provided temporary housing through various agencies and has expanded to 28 units in four sites.

During a 1990 conference sponsored by the program, attendees were asked to come up with a longer-term solution. That day, seven people, including Bissonnette, raised their hands. A year later, the Committee to End Elder Homelessness opened Bishop Street, the first of six residences, which houses 130 elders.

One of the residences, in the heart of Boston's South End, is named the Anna Bissonnette House, and provides permanent housing for 40 formerly homeless elders. A seventh house is slated to be opened by the organization, now called Hearth, in Dorchester in 2010.

Bissonnette had studied to become a nun after finishing high school in Illinois. But three months before taking her vows, she decided to leave. Soon after, she enrolled in nursing school.

She met her wife, Marion Kenneally, a retired public school teacher, through friends in 1980. They've been together ever since, and married four years ago.

In 2001, Bissonnette became one of six people on the steering committee of the LGBT Aging Project, an organization that works toward educating healthcare workers and the public of the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender elders.

The need for training to help professionals reach out to seniors who are gay became apparent, Bissonnette said, as they require the same kind of support that conventional married couples need.

To learn more on Hearth, visit hearth-home.org or call 617-369-1550. For more on LGBT Aging Project, visit lgbtagingproject.com