Cross Roads House executive director provides shelter on the Seacoast

All through his professional journey in New Hampshire — as community college president, as state economic policy wonk, as director of transitional and emergency shelter for the homeless — Will Arvelo has had one purpose: create community.

“The thing that I always have reflected on as both a kid and an adult is how do we improve community, improve the lives of individuals and families, so that we can create better communities?” Arvelo said.

Currently, Arvelo is the executive director of Cross Roads House in Portsmouth, which provides emergency and transitional shelter to homeless men, women and children in the Seacoast area.

Before that, he was director of the state Division of Economic Development. Before that, he was president of Great Bay Community College in Portsmouth.

A journey fulfilled

It’s been a journey influenced by his own life experience — as the child of subsistence farmers in Puerto Rico where he was born, then on the streets of Spanish Harlem in New York City, even homeless for a time as he sorted out the forks in the road that, ultimately, led to Bunker Hill Community College, then the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1989.

What followed was a string of jobs in education, mostly at the community college level, while he earned his master’s degree in public affairs from UMass-Boston in 1991 and ultimately his doctorate in education in 2001. He worked in two capacities at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology before coming to New Hampshire.

During his time at Great Bay Community College (GBCC), from July 2007 to December 2017, he helped transform the college, long considered a second-chance school for educational outcasts who couldn’t cut it in the four-year colleges and universities. He sought to raise its brand, make it a destination school, a place to learn a trade, in particular learn a highly skilled trade to meet the growing demand of the high-tech manufacturers moving to the state. He fought to have community college credits count toward university degrees.

A prime example of this effort was the creation of GBCC’s Advanced Technology and Training Center in Rochester to educate and train students specifically for jobs at the Safran plant in Rochester that makes composite-material, jet-engine fan blades.

“I was always beating the pavement and knocking on business doors and asking, ‘What is that we can do for you to create training that will allow you to grow and expand and hire and do all the great things that allow businesses to do their thing and expand and make the state a great state?’,” he said.

For some students, according to Arvelo, the community college experience was transformative, “seeing people blossom, come in with low self-esteem and low confidence, then after a semester, seeing a very different person that was very confident and empowered. That, to me, to see that, is very rewarding.”

Michael Fischer worked at Great Bay Community College in various capacities for a little more than 11 years, most of them with Arvelo. His last served as associate vice president of economic and workforce development.

“Will’s visionary leadership and strategic initiatives not only transformed institutions, businesses, and communities but, more importantly, they touched and transformed countless lives, including my own,” said Fischer, now president of York County Community College in Wells, Maine.

Fischer recalls with pride the programs established at Great Bay to meet the specific needs of employers, such as Safran and Lonza Biologics in Portsmouth. He cited the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as another example.

A period of transition

After 11 years with GBCC, with Arvelo feeling that the college “was in a good place,” he answered Gov. Chris Sununu’s invitation to serve as director of the state Division of Economic Development.

“I’d been at Great Bay for 11 years, and I thought it was really time for me to transition to something else. I had some interest to continue to work in workforce and economic development, and when this opportunity came along it was just at the right time,” said Arvelo after taking the state job. “I thought I could have an impact across the state. I have a really strong interest in working with the communities across the state. It’s just a natural fit.”

Again, it was an opportunity for Arvelo to build relationships among business/industry, communities and individuals.

“At the state level, it was more so on a business level, seeing businesses thrive and with the little things that we were able to do for them and to see what they could do for their employees,” he said. “How do you improve a business so that they can turn around and hire more people and improve the lives of their employees?”

That work, like all work, was disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Arvelo managed his team, did his work mostly by phone and Zoom.

“We did some good work,” he said.

“Again, part of my job with my team at the state level was to go around and have conversations with businesses and try to figure out what are the things that are getting in your way, how can we as a state entity or state agency, assist, make it a little easier for you to do business in New Hampshire and to grow your business? I love that work. I love it. But COVID kind of got away, and after four years I decided that I was not going to continue to the state level.”

He was ready to take a job with Granite State College when he received a call inviting him to apply for the executive director’s job at Cross Roads House. For a variety of reasons, and having lived the experience of homelessness, he chose the path to Cross Roads.

“Here, it comes back to the individual and families,” he said. “How do we serve somebody who’s going through a really difficult time in their lives, get back to a sense of stability and normality through the process of working with them, housing them, feeding them, and eventually providing the case management and the wraparound services that allow us to get them to stability and eventually on to housing and back into the community.”

‘We’re part of communities’

Cross Roads can shelter up to 120 individuals and provide additional services that include meals, needs assessments and case management services, and access to a variety of services on-site (including mental health counseling, primary medical and dental care, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings).

He sees his work now as two-fold: overseeing the day-to-day operations of Cross Roads and advocating for social justice. That advocacy encompasses racial and gender equality, as well as equal access to housing, health services and food security.

The pandemic exacerbated Arvelo’s sense that the separation between the haves and the have-nots was growing. Housing prices, for example, ballooned during the pandemic, making affordable rents and residential property purchases out of reach for many more people.

“All of a sudden people who have the resources to get out of the cities because they’re afraid of catching COVID now have the resources to do so,” he said. “But in places like New Hampshire, what it does is it puts tremendous pressure on the housing stock. And, as a result of that, what we’re seeing is, now, people who were formerly in housing and could pay their rent and so forth, are now ending up here because they can no longer afford to pay their rent. These are first-time homeless, many of them on fixed incomes, many of them elderly, with underlying health issues.”

Arvelo doesn’t buy into the notion that individuals, no matter their circumstances, should ultimately be responsible for improving themselves.

“I’ve always had a problem with that notion. As human beings, we’re not set up to exist on our own,” he said. “We’re part of families, we’re part of communities, are part of a broader society. What that means is that we’re complex, and we succeed and we fail. The notion of the individual standing alone and figuring it out is, to me, completely off base. We are best when we learn to work together as a family unit or as a community.”

His three pillars of social advocacy — to state legislators, to local boards and commissions — are housing, health care and food.

“If you take care of the most basic things as a society, whether it’s housing, whether it’s food security, whether it’s health care, just those three things right there, I think for most people, you set them up at a place where that is a place from where they can leap,” he said. “And what they make up their lives is then dependent upon them, where they want to take it.

“But people need housing, you need a roof over your head to have stability and to be able to have safety and then make decisions about where you’re going to go,” he added. “You need to have food to nourish your body, so that you can go to college, or you get through K-12 and go to a job and do a job well. And you need to be healthy. I think we do those things not very well.”

And there is a social justice component to Arvelo, who is chair of the Business Alliance for People of Color.

“For the life of me, I just never understood why we as human beings really fear the different, when the different brings diversity, brings richness,” he said.