Familiar Faces: How Saint Paul Workers Help Get People Off the Streets to Safety

The Dog-Bite Story

“Tell the dog-bite story,” said Familiar Faces outreach specialist Sam Stoltz. This was a half-hour into our interview, when everybody had warmed up a little. 

Jen Kissling chuckled. Jen is Sam’s colleague, a life coach and case manager. “There was a dog bite at an encampment a few weeks ago, and Sam got there first. This woman could have lost her hand, and yet she told us she still loves the dog. Still loves animals.” (Paw-Paw, the dog pictured with Jen here, is a different animal entirely. He belongs to another Familiar Faces client.)

Sam took over telling the story. “Jen and I went to the encampment at the Fish Hatchery at nine a.m. Someone I knew came up to me: ‘Do you have any clean gauze? Somebody got bit by a dog.’ We turn around, and this woman came out of a group of tents—she’s got dried blood on her face, blood everywhere. It was like a goddamn horror movie. It had happened at midnight, nine hours before! When we offered to call an ambulance, she said, ‘We can’t go anywhere, I’ve got open warrants.’”

But somehow, Sam and Jen persuaded the woman who’d been bitten to go to the hospital. They made sure she didn’t get arrested, and they followed up with her constantly. So far, it’s all worked out. “We took her to have a follow-up appointment today,” Jen said proudly. “The medical professional said it looks good. Her hand is still attached.”

For the members of the Office of Neighborhood Safety’s Familiar Faces team, that was all in a day’s work. Showing up for people in their most vulnerable moments, treating them like family, and connecting them to the support they need—that’s what they do every day.

Sam followed up later to explain why the dog-bite story had made such an impression.

“Meeting that person in the hospital,” Sam wrote, “completing the necessary assessment, learning about the open warrants, connecting to the courts; requesting new court dates and quashing warrants, and now talking to her estranged mom per the client’s request: Those are steps other entities are either missing or are unable to follow through on. Our strong suits are flexibility and follow-through. We follow our clients through different systems, and even into different cities if needed. That is the most important part.”

Familiar Faces for Familiar Faces

Familiar Faces is Saint Paul’s home-grown program to improve quality of life for everyone by supporting for our most vulnerable neighbors, one conversation at a time. Here’s how they explain what they do:

Saint Paul residents who face serious mental health and substance abuse challenges often get stuck in a vicious cycle of unstable shelter: emergency room, county jail, temporary housing. In between, they have nowhere to go but the streets.

Through Familiar Faces, ONS workers help the most vulnerable members of our community get their basic needs met, work toward safe and stable housing, and get off the streets to safety.

“We focus on folks who cycle in and out of court, hospitals, jails—the ones that some don’t want to talk to,” said program manager Christine “Chris” Michels, who leads the program. These are the “familiar faces” that cops, paramedics, emergency-room staff and treatment providers encounter, day after day. Any of us could end up in their situation. They are military veterans who drink to manage their traumatic memories; people who got an opioid prescription at just the wrong time. They are people ambushed by mental illness, medical debt, abuse at home, sudden unemployment, or any of the other perils to which our precarious age makes us all vulnerable.

“People that fall through the cracks,” said Chris. “People who have been written off. That’s who we serve.” To prevent them from ending up familiar to emergency care systems, she and the members of her team work relentlessly to become familiar faces, too.

Since their work began in November 2024, the team has succeeded so well that even talking about their results sounds like bragging. They do not like bragging.

Stubborn Humility

It took months to persuade the team to agree to talk about their work for this post. Even when they finally agreed to sit down for an interview, they were not very happy about it.

First of all, sitting in a conference room at the Office of Neighborhood Safety’s downtown office is not what these four people joined City government to do. Like most professionals who work to end unsheltered homelessness, they have a passion for doing the work on the streets, not talking about it indoors.

Secondly, they are stubborn about not taking credit for anything.

“Talking about what we do feels patting ourselves on the back,” grumbled Chris. “Like we’re boasting about it.”

“I don’t like talking about it,” Sam agreed. “I’m not a big talker in general.”

At this Jen laughed out loud.

Though tight-lipped when talking about the work, Sam can be very talkative on the job, interacting with the people in Saint Paul that nobody else wants to talk to. The team calls this talkativeness “assertive outreach” and “relentless engagement.”

It’s not easy, but it’s simple. And it works.

18 Months, 2,771 Calls to 911 Avoided, 50 People Housed

In fairness to Chris, talking factually about Familiar Faces really can sound pretty boastful. Established in November 2024, the program has achieved dramatic results quickly, with a shoestring budget and a staff you can count on the fingers of one hand.

By April 2026, just a year and a half into its existence, the Familiar Faces team’s “assertive outreach” and “relentless engagement” with unhoused Saint Paul residents had already:

• reached out to 580 individual people
• across 2,801 individual interactions, during which they
• made 365 referrals to shelter, housing, or services, and
• called the police or fire department just 30 times.

That means the other 2,771 times the team interacted with Saint Paul residents on the streets, police officers and emergency medical responders didn’t have to—freeing them up to respond more quickly to emergencies citywide.

“The City has a whole toolbox full of enforcement tools and emergency-response tools,” Chris explained. “We offer a something beyond crisis response: crisis prevention.”

Jen told a story about just that. “We had a client in the skyway,” she remembered, “who was having a psychotic episode. We were there over an hour and a half with her. We got her to take her meds so she could go on. We didn’t have to call any other first responders. If she’d been by herself, someone would have totally called the cops.” Because the Familiar Faces team was there, nobody had to.

The team’s crisis-prevention approach has succeeded. As of May 1, 2026, Familiar Faces has helped 50 people get off the streets and into secure, stable housing. This is the accomplishment the team would most like to boast about—if they boasted, which they don’t. (That’s what this post is for.)

Combating Homelessness in Saint Paul, One Conversation at a Time

Next time you’re waiting for the Green Line at Dale, or walking around downtown, see if you can spot somebody from the Familiar Faces team. They drive around in a little white truck with the City logo on it. (“I feel really bad for the Public Works staff who drive the same trucks,” Chris chuckled. Unhoused neighbors flag them down all the time, hoping they’re Familiar Faces folks.)

Chris, Jen, Sam, and life coach case manager Raven Davis probably won’t be in the truck when you see them; they spend almost all their time outside, walking around, talking to the people that most others walk right past, or cross the street to avoid.

The four current members of the Familiar Faces team got to know each other working at Catholic Charities. When Saint Paul and Ramsey County decided to start a new program within Saint Paul government to support people without safe places to live, all four of them decided to make the leap. “This type of work is super-important to us,” Chris said. “We needed a change of pace, but we still wanted to move the needle to help people.”

Moving the needle to help people without a safe place to stay: amid a worsening nationwide housing crisis, in a city reeling from Operation Metro Surge, it’s a tall order. But the Familiar Faces team shows up every day to do their best.

“We are a small part of the solution,” Jen said. “We’re just chipping away. We’re never going to end homelessness; that’s not a reality in our time. So we’re going to stabilize people and get them housed. It’s needed. It doesn’t look large-scale, but it’s necessary if you want to move the needle slightly.”

In the eighteen months they’ve been on the job, the Familiar Faces team has done moved the needle more than just slightly.

What Makes Familiar Faces Unique

The team’s new successes follow from a new approach. Familiar Faces is the first group of City experts empowered specifically to support the people who live outdoors in Saint Paul, one on-one, every day. It’s a job not many people can even imagine.

When people ask What do you do, Sam replies simply, “I work with people who sleep outside.”

Raven’s answer to the same question is more detailed: “I work with people that are unhoused and need extra support in being lifted up. They ask for help with basic stuff—getting in contact with their probation officer or public defender, finding food or a shower or medical care or housing.”

The members of the Familiar Faces team are City employees with salaries and benefits, and the high expectations that come with public service. They are also veteran social service workers who have cultivated years-long relationships with City departments, community nonprofits, county and state agencies, neighborhoods, families, and individual human beings. Their job description is to support people through a thicket of bureaucratic complexity to defy the odds and get off the streets to housing and safety.

That mandate sets Familiar Faces apart from other experts who work with unhoused neighbors in Saint Paul.

“We are super-nimble,” Chris explained. “We have a lot of leeway. The systems of care our colleagues work within are complicated, bureaucratic systems, where people stay in their professional lanes. The court people stay in their lane to facilitate treatment placement; the substance-use treatment people stay in their lane. The treatment people aren’t talking to the court people.”

That’s not their fault, Jen said; it’s just the nature of public systems: “Even for us, navigating the systems is tricky.” People without stable housing end up getting caught between support systems all the time—and when they do, it wasn’t anybody’s responsibility to stay in touch with them.

That’s where the Familiar Faces team comes in. “We track the people through all those systems of care,” Chris said, “anticipating the gap, and trying to be there to catch people when they fall through the cracks.”

“That’s what’s different about us,” Jen added. She offered an example: “Raven has a client who’s been getting shuffled between counties.” This person’s intellectual disabilities are serious; by Jen’s estimate, she is “cognitively a ten-year old. I think to myself: If Raven wasn’t able to do the legwork between county systems, we’d see that client back on the street in three weeks. This client is super-familiar now with Raven. She looks forward to seeing her. She listens to her.” Jen pauses. “There’s not someone else like that in her life right now.”

This is what the Familiar Faces team does: they show up, persistently and relentlessly, to advocate for the dignity of the Saint Paul neighbors who fall between the cracks of other systems.

Doing Right by “Somebody’s Somebody”

The team does not want you to romanticize their work. They can’t always show up for unhoused neighbors with unconditional love: sometimes, they have to remind people that they’re not allowed to use drugs on Parks property, or to insist that somebody who doesn’t want treatment really needs it, right now. It’s never easy, and sometimes tragic.

Sam talked about a particularly challenging recent client: “This person was a big problem on the street.” She was aggressively panhandling customers outside a popular business, and their customers felt unsafe. In this case, the team’s goal wasn’t independent housing: “We wanted to get her into a treatment facility that’s going to keep her there,” Sam said.

So far, that hasn’t happened. But the members of the Familiar Faces team persist, every day, all year long.

Why do they do this work?

“There were a lot of people sleeping outside where I went to school in Montana,” Sam reflected. “I have been addicted to them ever since. It’s a different breed who sleeps outside in the winter—typically, old drunk men. A lot of veterans. They’re my people.”

Jen is drawn to the urgency of the work. Before she started working with people who sleep outside, Jen worked at a domestic violence shelter. “I’ve always been drawn to emergency situations—the fast pace. No day’s the same.”

For everyone on the team, the real purpose of the job is to show up for people who deserve more dignity than our society has afforded them.

People who sleep outside, Sam said, are “always somebody’s somebody.”

Chris laughed. “You took my line!” It’s true: Chris says that all the time. The whole team does.

For these Saint Paul workers, caring for somebody’s somebody is not just an abstract philosophy.

As Saint Paul residents themselves, Familiar Faces team members often know the clients they work with personally, or just one removed. Sometimes, Jen said, people they work with “have been family to people we know. If your family member were in this situation, how would you want them to be treated?”

Beyond all their skill in navigating complex bureaucracies and keeping track of dozens of people who have no fixed address, the Saint Paul workers on the Familiar Faces team take the greatest satisfaction in simple human connection.

“I started doing outreach at St. Stephens a million years ago,” explained Sam. “We did a survey and asked what unhoused people actually wanted. The majority just wanted eye contact and some kind of acknowledgment. That’s what I think about.”

People who end up living outdoors “feel invisible,” Chris added. “A lot of what we do is just normalizing people’s existence—smiles, waving. Looking someone in the eye and saying hello.” Chris pauses, then comes back to the team’s guiding principle: “Everybody is somebody’s somebody.”

With Mayor Her’s support, the Office of Neighborhood Safety is hiring a fifth member of the Familiar Faces team, a new outreach specialist to join Sam and life coaches Jen and Raven. If you see them around the City, say hello. And when you encounter people in Saint Paul who don’t have a safe place to stay, please remember: Everybody is somebody’s somebody.