Miller reflects on path to becoming Amherst’s CRESS director

April 12, 2022 | Dylan Corey
dcorey@thereminder.com

Earl Miller
Reminder Publishing submitted photo

AMHERST – Earl Miller will use his life experience and solutions-oriented work history as well as social-forward strategies to respond to non-violent emergency calls as the new leader of Amherst’s Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service (CRESS) Department.

CRESS is a public safety department and sister agency with the Police Department, Fire Department, and emergency dispatch.

Miller moved to Western Massachusetts shortly after he was born to young parents in Connecticut. He was exposed to lead paint in his house in Indian Orchard and found himself in foster care as a 12-year-old. He was separated from his six siblings while in foster care and said he wasn’t exactly a standout patient while in the system. Miller started grappling with mental health struggles but pinpointed feeling abandoned as the main stressor at that point.

“I really resisted all of the supports because it felt like if my family doesn’t care then why would this kind of system care much more,” Miller said. “When I was 18, I ran away from that. I moved out to Michigan and lived there for three years. I ended up living with my birth mother for a pretty short period of time and then making my way through Michigan. I love Western Mass., which I think is a thing you can only say if you’ve left for a little bit. I never quite felt at home anywhere else, so I was out there for a few years, I turned 21 and really decided at that point it felt like my life course was on a crash course with failure and I figured I’d rather fail at home than do it somewhere strange.”

In 2008, right around President Barack Obama’s first election, the 21-year-old Miller began waiting tables and living with his late sister Erikka in subsidized housing on Pearl Street in Springfield, right next to the Police Department. Miller didn’t have a bank account until he was almost 30 thanks in part to trust issues with the government and society.

“I was at a laundromat washing my clothes and I put my wallet underneath my clothes so I could go get laundry detergent,” Miller said. “I turned my back for two minutes, came back and it was gone. All the money I had in the world. I couldn’t pay rent to my sister; I don’t have the sort of family where I can go stay on someone’s couch so I just became homeless. It was like I lost my wallet at 2 o’clock on a Wednesday, I was homeless by Thursday.”

Miller said the first thing you do in that situation is have a conversation with yourself. You start looking for any available resource and tell yourself what you will have to do to stay safe and warm. Growing up in that same area, he said he knew how homeless people were kicked out of shady places in the summer and warmer spots in the winter.

“You have to accept reality very quickly, you’ve knocked on the last door on the street. There is nothing,” Miller said. “That’s a really depressing, scary place to be and you have to focus and the warmest and safest places to go. You try to find a place and hide. I don’t think folks realize how much time you spend hiding that you’re homeless.”

Miller hid when leaving his job at a comedy club late at night. He kept that job the entire time he was homeless but was still below the poverty line. He joined a gym to shower and continued doing laundry at the same laundromat. Miller pretended to be walking home after work until he eventually found a spot to stop pretending.

It was during this time that Miller said he saw the benefit of humans caring for one another. He said he wishes he could say a shelter gave him services during this time, but instead it was a “really nice hippie lady” in Forest Park that gave him a couch that summer.

“Thinking of the work I do now, that sort of community kindness has always been really transformative for me,” Miller said. “I’ve had lots of interactions with systems and it’s really easy for a system to lose who you are as a person, but not when it’s just a person being kind.”

That kindness and the birth of his daughter helped Miller start to turn everything around, he said. His daughter was born in December 2010 to an ex-significant other who had a daughter from a previous relationship. Miller said he treated her as his own and rapidly went from no family to two children. Having children, he explained, was ultimately what made him want to figure out how to contribute to the world.

Miller stayed at home with his daughter until 2012 when he used a GED from the Owl Learning Center to land his first job in the field at the Western Mass. Recovery Learning Center, now rebranded as the Wildflower Alliance, to provide peer support.

“I started doing peer support and really quickly peer support just made sense to me,” Miller said. “The idea that what people need is someone who cares about them whether or not they’re doing good or doing bad. I started one summer and by the next summer was running the center. I don’t know if it was because I was especially capable, but I loved the place. That work was a lot of working with homeless people, people who are living on the streets, people in group homes, people who didn’t have families, and in a lot of ways people who were just like me.”

Miller would hold people’s babies at the hospital who didn’t have anyone else. He was a witness for the elderly as they reached the end of their lives. He assisted with everything in between, as people were released from prison or just tried to figure out their life. He recalled a woman winning $50,000 on a scratch ticket and realizing that even having someone to celebrate with in that moment is so pivotal.

“That’s the thing when you’re homeless that you don’t have,” he said. “‘Who am I going to celebrate with? Who’s going to be with me if things work out? Why would I want things to work out if nobody’s going to be happy for me?’”
That work was out of the Bowen Resource Center which still exists but has been relocated. There, Miller learned how to talk with people in emotional distress. He picked up on what worked and what didn’t and has carried that knowledge ever since.

Miller teamed up with the late Michealann Bewsee who was on the board of the Rainville, a building project focused on housing the homeless with an income-based rent. The apartment building had 42 units but Miller knew the number of people needing a house was well above that mark. He had his card in nearly every taxi in Springfield, fielding phone calls day and night. They wound up finding homes for 100 people outside of the Rainville building.

“Part of the reason I think services fail people of color is because clinical assessment to a large degree is based on whether or not you’re afraid of something,” Miller said. “‘Is there something in here that gives me pause?’ When the people making that decision are overwhelmingly upper-class white women, it makes sense in our context that they look at young black men and think ‘They’re risky.’”

Miller was later hired as the director of recovery with the Department of Mental Health, an experience he described as scratching his own lottery ticket. He was the only black manager there while they had just started establishing the race, equity and inclusion process. Again, he saw himself in the people that asked for support and acknowledged the pride and sense of self that it takes every time you ask.

A short while later, Miller was encouraged to apply for the CRESS director position.

“In my mind, I’m still living in Forest Park. When I dream, I’m homeless,” Miller said. “The Amherst job seemed like a dream position. When something seems like a dream position in my life it often is a dream. Once I saw this job, I realized they were going to let me solve problems. They were going to really try to do this the right way with the team we come up with. I couldn’t say no to it. I’m all in, that’s who I am as a person. I don’t have a safety net. There is no plan B for me, I’ve got to make this work.

“We’re working with them like any public safety department,” he said. “We have two months of training coming up, at least three of those weeks are going to be drills to practice what it would look like when we respond to calls. This is radical, grasping at the roots radical. The last time we had a new public safety department was the late 1800s. The great part is the dispatch, police and fire departments were all on the implementation committee. I have real faith that they’re invested in us being successful, I think they know the future is here. I think leadership folks in Amherst want to be a part of shaping it.”

CRESS has not yet posted any but will be looking to fill positions with eight responders. The department will become active at a time when many people will be struggling to find homes as government aid evaporates and housing costs rise.

“I’m looking for people who are as passionate as I am about CRESS,” Miller said. “I think about it all day and night. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it’s not just a chance to be the best but also to be first. We’re also looking for people with experience in behavioral policy, whether that’s lived experience, someone who’s been a user of services or worked in the system. We already have people interested without the jobs posted because they think this is going to be a chance to change at least a little corner of the world if not a bigger piece. I want people who are curious, who like people, and who feel like people even on their worst day matter.”

Miller emphasized the importance of the CRESS responders having a distinct role. He said their mission is all about engaging people and getting ahead of the crisis, rather than waiting around for one to happen. He said he wants his team to be in the field having coffee with and visiting homeless people at the library on the good days so that they can be a friendly, familiar face on the bad ones.

“I respect the police officers in Amherst, they’ve been warm and receptive to me. But I think we have to start to be honest as a society about what it means to invite a person with a gun to a conversation,” Miller said. “I’m having the worst moment of my life and the only solution that we’ve historically offered is ‘Hey, someone with a firearm is going to show up here and you’d better hope that they’re the best they can be.’”

The town’s website says CRESS will “[p]rovide community safety services in situations that don’t involve violence or serious crime. It will create a civilian, unarmed alternative to calls that might otherwise require a response from the Police Department.” Miller said there will be two months of training with at least 80 hours dedicated to de-escalation. He said de-escalation may not work for every single call, but he expects it to work the vast majority of the time. Should any situations escalate, CRESS responders will have a radio to communicate with other public safety departments.

“We believe we will successfully conclude engagements not just with de-escalation but then giving resources,” Miller said. “A lot of it is people are in emotional distress because of needs not getting met, and the system basically says, ‘Calm down.’ But if you can’t get your basic needs met, you probably should be pretty upset. Especially in a place like Western Mass. where you can see so many people who have more than their needs met.

“Thank God for Amherst, the community seems to be willing to back up its good intentions with resources,” he added. “Lots of places over the last few years have had the conversation about racism. To then follow it up with something like CRESS or a reparations working group is what people are talking about with doing the work. It’s easy to say that racism exists, it’s hard to do the work to undo it.”

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