Personalities 52 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine courtesy photob Contrarian 9 don’t fix it.’ We have to think in new ways about these old problems. So, when I say that I’m a contrarian, what I want you to understand is that ANY- THING would be better than leaving things as they are, or paring them down even fur- ther. Why haven’t the resources been found yet to fix these problems? People have to re- member your problem, the issue you’re work- ing at. In order to break out of the comfort of the status quo, we need to consider the kind of big ideas that will stick in your mind. I like to think of myself as a systems an- alyst. After all, my prior careers were as a CPA and Microsoft engineer, so I am try- ing to analyze the problem of what is going wrong, why our system doesn’t make new so- lutions. I see how there are bottlenecks that pop up. How do we break through institu- tional and personal patterns of thinking (as institutions are made out of people)? If you want to fix an airplane, you don’t do it with a band-aid. You need something much more complex. Housing is a cruise- ship-sized problem. We need an idea on the A ctivist founder of MemoryWorks and self-confessed contrarian, Ken Capron, 67, was born in Eastport and is a retired CPA and Microsoft engi- neer. A former director of accounting at Maine Medical Center, Capron recently proposed plans for the Hope Harbor Proj- ect. His vision is to purchase and reconfig- ure a used cruise ship to provide services and housing capacity to take a direct step toward eliminating homelessness in Maine. We caught up with Capron to get some in- sight on his approach, because it seems that whatever one thinks of the idea, he’s un- questionably gotten people talking about it. I would describe myself as a contrarian, an out-of-the-box thinker, and a creative in- novator. That’s a challenge no matter where you are, but in Maine as in anywhere it can sometimes be hard to get people to listen. While working with seniors with demen- tia, it became obvious to me that there’s a shortage of housing for seniors, especially as- sisted housing. That affects all seniors, wheth- er they’re healthy or not. It got more and more frustrating to keep running into this is- sue, so I started to look for alternatives. The people I met through the demen- tia program have really given me a heads- up when it comes to homelessness. Many of the problems are similar, and many prob- lems overlap. People in the homeless commu- nity might be suffering from dementia—and certainly do at higher rates than the aver- age population. Statewide, there are proba- bly 1,200 people on any given night who need housing and who might not be able to get it: There’s a lack of women’s shelters, youth shel- ters, and shelters for immigrant populations. My approach is to always have an alter- native solution. The way we’re doing things right now is not working. We keep looking back at the old ways. We have to get rid of that knee-jerk reaction of ‘If it ain’t broke, scale of a cruise ship to address it! I was impressed, however, to find out there’s a little bit of room for new ideas here in Maine. For example, new thinking has shifted resources away from newcomers to the long-stayers, the cases who they see re- peatedly. We want to take this model and expand it so that we can focus on the out- come of turning that number of 1,200 who can’t find housing into zero, over time. What we want people to understand about our project is that this would be a nearly ready-to-go solution that would be easily refitted into office space, worker hous- ing, homeless housing, and emergency over- flow for other underserved populations as we’d need. It’d help us avoid the NIM- BY [Not In My Backyard] problem, help us avoid the need to find, get approval, and build a facility on land that might receive understandable protests from those in the immediate vicinity. A converted cruise ship is not unprecedented: emergency temporary refugee housing on ferries and cruise ships is being employed in Europe. [We even sent the Scotia Prince to New Orleans for hurri- cane relief.] The number one thing we want people to know about this is that this idea is not a ship of shelter housing, but would instead be an immediate and available set of social service offices including housing that we could rap- idly reconfigure. We want to create a one-stop shop for services so that we’d be able to have the greatest impact possible on any residents. Without external funding, Capron co- founded MemoryWorks with Donna Be- veridge out of the desire to create peer-to- peer support networks, based on his con- cept of ‘memory cafes’ that could supple- ment the services they experienced after their own diagnoses. Based at 1375 Forest Avenue in Portland, MemoryWorks has grown from a few meetings of volunteer time to a homegrown charity that provides memory screenings and a comfortable en- try point for people who, for example, may be undiagnosed but have been having terri- fying moments. Capron has proposed that the ship be docked at the International Marine Ter- minal. And he challenges every one of us to come up with a better idea that, like his cruise ship, matches the scale of the problem. *ToreadJonathanSwifts’s“AModestProposal,” seehttp://bit.ly/AModestProposalSwift By Colin S. Sargent Kenneth A. Capron has A Modest Proposal* for a Cruise-Ship-Sized Problem. ANYTHING would be better than leaving things as they are.