We want you to imagine a woman. She used to host Thanksgiving every year with twelve people around a table she had set since 1998, using the same chipped serving dish and debating whether the stuffing needed more sage. Now, she keeps a photo of that table folded in her wallet. The table is gone, the people are scattered, and the place that once brought them together no longer exists.
When we picture being unhoused, we most often picture the absence of a roof. However, ask anyone who has lived through this experience, and you’ll hear about a different loss first: the loss of being known by the community. The loss of the mailman waving as they drop off a birthday card, of fellow community members who look at you and not through you. This is the loss we are speaking about. A home is the quiet infrastructure that holds a person within a web of relationships, and when it disappears, that web frays with it.
This is the first piece in our blog series this month, and it begins with a question worth sitting with: What does it mean to be part of a community when you have no home? The answer reshapes the understanding of Nest’s actual role in our community and beyond.
Belonging Is A Basic Need
Human beings are wired for connection, so much so that our brains evolved to expect the presence of others. Our ancestors depended on one another to meet their most basic needs. That biological need to connect has not gone away, even in an age when technology lets us live in near-total isolation.
The importance of connection for survival is well-supported by evidence. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory states that lacking social ties can increase the risk of early death, comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily. This is the part most people miss when looking at our unhoused population as purely a housing problem. Belonging sits alongside food, water, and shelter on the list of things a human being needs to survive and function. It is not a reward people earn once they are stable. It is part of what makes stability possible in the first place.
What Gets Lost When Home Is Gone
Losing a home strips away far more than walls; it removes the social scaffolding most of us never notice because we have never had to live without it. There is no longer a kitchen to host a friend, no stable address to receive a letter, no reliable place to be reached or visited.
Researchers who study the situation of being unhoused describe it not only as a housing crisis but as a crisis of disconnection. Being unhoused involves the loss of stable housing, social support networks, and a sense of belonging within a community, all at once. The losses compound one another. Relationship breakdown is frequently a precursor to becoming unhoused, and isolation deepens throughout the experience itself.
There is also the weight of being treated as invisible, and the hurt that comes with it. People living unhoused frequently describe feeling abandoned by society, mistrusted, and shunned, which leads many to withdraw further. The longer someone is unseen, the harder it becomes to believe they belong anywhere at all. Isolation can become a trap, making it even harder to find the way back into the community.
How We Build Belonging
Shelter is infrastructure, the foundation that enables reconnection to the community. Sheltering provides a consistent place to return to, with staff who learn your name and notice when a guest is not there. Reintegrating our guests back into the community is our mission.
This is the work we’ve been doing for 25 years. Providing beds, meals, connections to services, and most importantly, providing a place where our guests are treated as part of our community. This is the difference between being alone out on the street and being greeted by name, having somewhere stable enough for relationships to form, and being met with dignity rather than suspicion is a key part of the rehousing journey.
When a guest has a reliable place to be, they can begin rebuilding the routines and relationships that being unhoused disrupted. They have a place where they can be reached, where they are remembered, and most importantly, we demonstrate that they belong in our community. This is our mission in action: to reconnect our guests with their community because belonging is a fundamental human need.
Coming home is also connecting back to the community
The woman at the beginning of our post, with the photo in her wallet, is representative and not an actual person; this story illustrates the loss of belonging. At Nest, helping her home means more than finding her four walls; it means rebuilding her place among others.
Community is not something you receive only after you finally have a home. It is part of how people find their way home. Over the coming weeks, this series will explore what this looks like in practice: the specific ways belonging is rebuilt and the people who are finding their way back to it. We hope you’ll follow along.
