Sarah Harpster

As a community leader in Keene working on basic needs issues for over fifteen years, I have become familiar with the impossible situations that people experiencing acute poverty face each day. When individuals and families reach the point of becoming unhoused, they have typically faced a cascading series of increasingly challenging issues, balancing basic needs around education/training, employment, transportation, health/nutrition, and housing to thread an often extremely narrow path to survival. For too many Granite Staters, one failure in the delicate balance of life - one illness, vehicle break-down, rent increase, or fine - is the reason they have fallen into a homeless situation in the first place. Once they have become unhoused, financially punishing them will only serve to deepen the crisis and solidify and extend their homelessness experience. This does nothing to serve our communities. If municipalities are required to enforce camping bans, I support offering them non-financial and non-punitive tools to meet that requirement. I believe that it is in everyone's interest to recover our neighbors from their homelessness experiences whenever possible. Those who are in the midst of these experiences need support as well as dignity in their road to recovery. I support HB1091 because it recognizes the realities faced by people experiencing homelessness and our public interest in working collaboratively with people who find themselves in these circumstances to help them regain stability in their lives, rather than exacerbating the overwhelming burdens they already face.