Mr. James had been reluctant to ask for for help. "I don't want to be anyone's burden," he said, as he stood on the porch he'd slept on for months.

Dear Friend,

Recently, longtime UNITY outreach worker Clarence White III got a call from a nurse at a local hospital. She had a 52-year-old homeless patient who couldn’t have surgery without a place to recover. He badly needed a hip replacement.

But when Clarence met James Simonton, he didn’t meet a sedentary person. “He doesn’t let his injury slow him down,” he said.

Nearly every day, Mr. James does light mechanic work and works on small carpentry projects, often sitting down to do them. But he couldn’t even bend over enough to tie his left shoe. “It’s gotten to the point where soon I won’t be able to work at all,” he said. “It’s just too painful to be on my feet.”

He’s worked to pay rent for years without any problems. But about 20 years ago, he picked up something too heavy and badly injured his hip. Over the past year, the pain has significantly worsened to the point where he walks with a distinct limp.

The post-Katrina work gutting and repairing homes also stays with him.  He developed some kind of breathing problem, a specialist told him recently after he landed in the emergency room, gasping for air.

UNITY caseworkers see situations like this every single day: hardworking people hit with a medical condition that forced them to stop working and thrust them into the spiral of homelessness.

While many people fall into homelessness and lift themselves back up within a few days, people with health conditions often are not able to work themselves back into an apartment. They end up living in cars and outside on streets and in abandoned buildings.

Mr. James pulled himself up a stairway, wincing as he moves his hip, bone on bone, up to the top of the stairs, to the open-air porch where he slept. “It’s what I have to do,” he said. “I don’t have any other place.”

Please help us house Mr. James  — and hundreds of other disadvantaged New Orleanians experiencing homelessness — with your donation for GiveNOLA Day.

Early giving has already begun.

Your GiveNOLA gift helps fund our dedicated street outreach team, rent assistance, furnishings, and supportive services.

Your gift is truly needed. 

UNITY secures competitive federal grants that provide rent assistance for some of the most needy people, but these grants come with onerous requirements: UNITY and our member organizations must raise 25% matching funds through donations from supporters or in-kind contributions. 

With a gift to UNITY of Greater New Orleans, you can make a tremendous difference for our community's most disadvantaged people.

Mr. James needs your help

A few weeks ago, Clarence was able to move James into a room in UNITY’s hotel program, where UNITY houses and feeds people who are in poor health and helps with laundry until they can be housed in a more permanent place. 

Before Mr. James can even think of getting back to work and self-sufficiency, he will need his hip replacement and time for rehab and healing.

But the other day, even after moving into the hotel, James was still attempting to do a little mechanic work, leaning on the side of a car so that he didn’t have to put his full weight on his hip.

All his life, he's spent his days working. “I don’t want to be anyone’s burden,” he said.

Still, he said, he was looking forward to returning to the hotel to run a nice hot bath and climbing into clean clothes to sleep. And very soon, he said, the hospital should be able to schedule his surgery, because he officially has a place to recover – and to call home.

To get Mr. James housed before his hip surgery, UNITY outreach worker Clarence White found him on the job and finalized paperwork on the hood of the UNITY van.

Did you know New Orleans now has the largest income gap between the rich and the poor of any city in our country? Did you know that income gap is the primary reason homelessness is such a persistent problem here? Rents are far out of reach of the 23% of the population who live below the poverty line.

The minimum wage is still only $7.25 an hour and many people make that or a little more doing essential work for the rest of us. Only 1 in 3 of low-income renters receive any rental assistance, because not enough is allocated. 

For GiveNOLA Day, we hope that you can help us address this troubling gap. 

To make matters worse, there is a new push at the federal and state level to incarcerate people experiencing homelessness and to do away with programs providing rent assistance and services for them.

There’s even a drive to get rid of the nonprofit coalitions of organizations that do most of work that has helped many thousands of people overcome homelessness. 

UNITY’s goal for 2026 is to permanently house at least 1,000 children and adults from the streets and homeless shelters, keep our collaborative of organizations strong, improve its skills at providing the proven best practices of housing and services, and fend off governmental attempts to cut rent-assistance programs and evict vulnerable people.  

Here at UNITY, we will never give up our devotion to the most disadvantaged New Orleanians. We ask you to continue to stand with us on their behalf.

Thank you so very much for caring about Mr. James and the many other vulnerable people who need your help!

Sincerely,
Martha
Martha J. Kegel
Executive Director

P.S. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your generosity and compassion for “the least of these.”