Dawn Kocuba cashed in everything she had for pills and booze.

Finally, she lost the house she had bought on her own when she was 28. 

“I ended up homeless,” said Kocuba, fighting back tears. “My family didn’t want anything to do with me. I stole from them.”

She also “lost” three years of her life, now a hazy memory of drugs and despair.

“That three year period, from 30 to 33 – was physically and emotionally devastating,” said Kocuba, now 37.

Perseverance to beat her drug addiction and a little luck ultimately brought her to St. Paul’s Community Outreach Center.

After going through detox, Kocuba starting attending AA meetings on the near Westside of Cleveland where she met Chuck Davenport.

Davenport had gone through his own personal downfall, losing his job at LTV Steel, his family after being introduced to crack.

“It beat me up,” Davenport said. “I gave everything away, basically,” including his family.

Finding a place to live at VOA (Volunteers of America), Davenport found out about St. Paul’s through a housemate named Angel. “I started coming by and volunteering,” he said.

St. Paul’s Outreach Center offers some of the most basic items – thousands of socks, basic hygiene kits including toothbrushes and soap, and a food pantry, to its neighborhood on a shoestring budget.

The people they help are predominately male, in their 40s and 50s. About half are white, nearly 10 percent Hispanic and the remainder African American.

With a budget at about $103,000 a year, they have a part-time nurse who treats people’s more minor ailments, basic first aid and helps keep diabetics – foot checks and others with chronic diseases healthy.

 For the past two years, St. Paul’s has received a Good Samaritan grant from the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland. The Good Samaritan program provides small grants to organizations and individuals providing basic needs and support to area residents.

 The center also employs people to do street outreach, passing out the basic need items and encouraging, sometimes driving, them to get tested for HIV. Testing is also done at the community center, which was started and runs out of St. Paul’s Community Church on Franklin Boulevard, on Cleveland’s near west side.

For the past year, Kocuba has worked a part-time street outreach worker for St. Paul’s.

“I do whatever is needed,” she said. “One of the prostitutes I was working with got into Laura’s Home (a women’s crisis center run by the City Mission).

 “That’s one less girl off the streets,” Kocuba said proudly.

While the work for Kocuba, now sober for 3 ½ years, is meaningful it’s not enough for her to pay rent or get health insurance.

She lives with her parents. The relationship was repaired after she got sober.

Davenport too is a part-time outreach worker and still lives in temporary housing. He’s picking up some other part-time work to help.

But like Kocuba, with no health insurance, both are struggling particularly with getting needed dental work.

“I’m asked to speak at places and I’m embarrassed,” Kocuba said. She is missing several teeth.

She’s found that the reception she receives calling doctors or dentists’ offices without insurance “makes you feel like half a person.”

Kocuba and Davenport are working hard to help other people’s lives better, but could use some help themselves.