He’s a 71-year-old Navy veteran who lives alone. He has developed dementia, and the disease is starting to impact his daily life.

Most if not all of us fear this situation. We have all heard the stories or had relatives caught up in the slow descent into dysfunction.

Fortunately, this veteran has some resources available to him in the form of an assigned social worker through the VA plus a daughter who can help too.

Unfortunately, collectively they could not prevent him from nearly getting evicted.

It all began with him missing a rent payment that he thought he’d made. The landlord added the onerous late fees due to this mistake. It snowballed in a month or so when his electronic payment was returned by the bank to the landlord, who added more late fees and eventually began eviction notification.

At this point, our Vincentian was assigned to him and began to document the whole messy and hard to follow series of transactions. Many hours were spent doing this research, speaking to the landlord, sourcing the cause of the failed payments. And along the way, they said some prayers together too.

Eviction prevention is one of the highest inflection points in our mission to help The Poor. That, coupled with his veteran status, led us to go above and beyond our normal guidelines to make a sizeable rent payment to avoid his eviction.

A partial solution for the future came when his recurring monthly payments were set up on Autopay, lessening the pressure to accurately manage his bills.

Thanks to the generosity of IHM parishioners, we were able to accomplish the goal of keeping him housed.

If you would like to find out more about becoming a Vincentian, please reach out to reach out to Javier Lerch at [email protected]

If a parishioner needs help, they can call 678-892-6163.

Case Number: 2024- 28064