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Accomplished Alumni: Lacy Hoyle, Buncombe County’s first Homelessness Program Manager

A Career Built in Community Service Begins at UNC Asheville

By UNC Asheville

May 3^rd, 2024

Lacy Hoyle’s biggest piece of advice to UNC Asheville students is to get involved in the community and volunteer at a variety of different places.

“A lot of my friends are doing things they did not go to school for but our common thread is that we are all doing things that we love. Our experience at UNC Asheville helped prioritize that and gave us a really great foundation,” said Hoyle.

Hoyle graduated from UNC Asheville in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Now, she’s Buncombe County’s first homelessness program manager.

She recommends “making the most of what is offered at UNC Asheville,” such as the service based learning classes, community engaged scholar program, the Key Center for community engagement, and more.

Hoyle chose the University for its interdisciplinary curriculum, which gave her the opportunity to explore career paths, and she graduated already having social work experience in the community and a home of support in Asheville.

Building a Career in Community Service

“I’ve always been a person who wanted to help other people ever since I was a kid,” said Hoyle.

Working within the community turned passion to career as she learned through field experience.

Volunteering at the Mediation Center, a nonprofit that creates space for conflict mediation located in downtown Asheville, gave Hoyle a “really, really good mentor” and a position as volunteer coordinator. This position led to being hired with Eliada Home, a nonprofit serving Western North Carolina families, directly after graduation.

When she started working with adults around housing and health care, Hoyle said she “really started to feel at home.”

She learned to serve people with thoughtfulness and interested ears as she transitioned from serving families and children to to minority and underserved populations in WNC. This perspective informed her work with Eliada, Western North Carolina Community Health Services, and Homeward Bound.

“I think when you work serving people, you have to learn how to have a thoughtful response to people if you want to serve someone effectively, because every person is different,” said Hoyle. “You have to show that you are interested in how they feel about things and what they want or need.”

During her time at these services, Hoyle worked as part of the inaugural treatment team at Eliada’s first Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility (PRTF), provided Medical Case Management to people living with HIV/AIDS for nine years, oversaw targeted case management services to minority and `underserved populations in the Western North Carolina Region, provided leadership and management of the Medical Case Management team serving 18 counties in WNC, and secured increased yearly funding to ensure continued growth of Rapid Rehousing and Prevention programs for Veterans and Civilians at Homeward Bound.

So now, Hoyle combines her extensive nonprofit experience, where she has learned “how to navigate through systems” with government work. Looking back, Hoyle has always found a way to incorporate housing work into her life, like building relationships with folks living unhoused while working at Barnes and Noble in college.

“What I like about this job is the same thing that I liked about social work. No day is really exactly the same as the other day,” said Hoyle. “But what's a nice change is that I'm doing a lot of research, writing, and preparing presentations.”

Hoyle brings new role to Buncombe County

Hoyle’s role was recommended in the National Alliance to End Homelessness’s study Within Reach: Ending Unsheltered Homelessness in the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care, released in January 2023. Her job, within the planning department of the Community Development Division, is to unify efforts across departments and teams to strategize making services accessible to unhoused folks.

“This is the first time the County has had a position like this so I'm helping to develop what our responses look like. What I would like to see is that we have outreach throughout the County. Right now we have outreach services primarily within City limits, and I'm working with folks at the County and partner organizations to expand that outreach to more rural parts of the County as well,” said Hoyle.

Hoyle says there was a significant rise in unsheltered homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic across the country and within Asheville. As it became noticeable locally, the city and county governments, along with Dogwood Health Trust, together asked the National Alliance to End Homelessness to study the community.

“The study helped figure out what the community was doing well and what it could be doing better and how it could make adjustments,” said Hoyle.

Now, informed by this study, Hoyle is focusing her new role on rural encampments, providing low-barrier shelter, and affordable housing.

“Most recently, the community development team has been reviewing applications for affordable housing services funding,” said Hoyle. “Organizations have made applications and we've been reviewing them and preparing information to take to the commissioners”

Low-barrier housing entails allowing unhoused community members into emergency shelter without conditions for securing or keeping a bed, like committing to a program or maintaining sobriety. This Housing First philosophy is a Nationally recognized, evidence based practice based on the idea that unhoused community members need basic needs, like housing, addressed first, in tandem with immediate and ongoing access to supportive services to help them maintain that housing.

Early on in her role, Hoyle noticed the high number of county rural encampments and created a goal to “develop resources in rural areas — figure out how to take some of the teams that are already working with folks and support them so that they can provide resources out there and really develop a thorough response to rural homelessness.”

Hoyle will also help transfer some of her planning work to the county’s restructured continuum of care, a planning body that helps local nonprofit providers as well as state and local governments to make decisions and recommendations about where funding should be allocated.

What keeps Hoyle motivated

Hoyle sees this job as an extension of being a lifelong student.

“I always loved being in school. I loved researching and writing papers and always wanted to find a way to just get paid to be a student,” said Hoyle. “So I have been really researching rural encampments right now.”

Hoyle in her Mills dorm during her time at UNC Asheville.

Hoyle says “it can be really easy when you’re passionate about something like this to get laser focused on it and spend a lot of your mental time at home thinking about it.” She “remembers different clients, each one's journey to get to where they needed to be, and the folks who didn't make it to where they needed to be.”

Yet, she “learned the hard way that you have to give yourself a break from it to be able to come back the next morning and keep doing it.”

To take care of herself, Hoyle does a lot of yoga, works out regularly, loves to read and cook, and is “a big plant person.” She has a dog named Mardi Gras and a family that she enjoys hiking with.

“I try to make sure I prioritize doing those things,” said Hoyle. “It helps keep me grounded and helps dispel stress.”

Further resources and advice

So, for students looking to follow in her footsteps, Hoyle advises a healthy balance.

“Do the work that you need to do during the time that you need to do it,” Hoyle said. “Then make sure you’re using your downtime to do things to take care of yourself and that you enjoy.”

Some of Hoyle’s favorite UNC Asheville memories are playing board games in Mills and taking her favorite classes such as Ann Dunne’s humanities class and Tracy Brown’s Linguistics class. The traditions of making friends in dorm halls and finding connections with professors still continues at UNC Asheville, but the University’s role in community involvement has only grown since Hoyle’s time.

UNC Asheville prioritizes community involvement today through service based learning classes, community engaged scholar program, the key center for community engagement, and more.

If students want to learn more about those living unhoused, she recommends reading Rough Sleepers.

“If you’re not a person who's worked with this population and you don’t have a concept of what it’s like to be on the streets with them, it’s a really good look into that,” said Hoyle.

Hoyle also recommends checking out Pack Library’s book club called books to action, the City’s Homeless Strategy website, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the NC Housing Coalition, and the NC Coalition to End Homelessness.

Footnotes

By Addison Wright '24

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FootNotes

By Addison Wright '24

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Accomplished Alumni: Lacy Hoyle, Buncombe County’s first Homelessness Program Manager

A Career Built in Community Service Begins at UNC Asheville

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Recognizing Zoobi’s Creative Legacy and Supporting Future New Media Students

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