alan banks

Born and raised in the Washington, DC area, Alan married right after graduation and joined the United States Air Force in 1977.  A four year veteran, he spent most of his service in North Dakota with the Strategic Air Command. “That’s where I learned to deal with the cold.”  After finishing his service he entered law enforcement, working for the District of Columbia Department of Corrections, the United States Department of Justice, and the U.S. Marshals, where he worked in diplomatic security.

In 1993 Alan joined the Smithsonian police force as a supervisor and firearms trainer.  Shortly thereafter, Alan’s father passed away.  The effect of this loss was devastating, and triggered a downward spiral in Alan’s life.  In 1996 he was diagnosed with major depression, but he couldn’t stick with the treatment and ended up separating from his wife of 19 ½ years.

Even though Alan was struggling in his personal life, he was able for a time to keep the depression from impacting his professional life.  Eventually, however, it ended up taking over his work and he was unable to perform.  “If I wasn’t at work I was in bed.”  In 2004 he lost his job with the Smithsonian Institute and two months later he was homeless. 

The first year that Alan experienced homelessness, he slept primarily on the street, but eventually he was pointed toward the Gospel Rescue Mission in downtown DC where primarily he spent 50 dollars a week to store his things while he re-entered the workforce.  He was able to rent an apartment, but with the high cost of housing in Washington, his options were limited.  The neighborhood he moved into was rife with drugs and violence, and one day when Alan was leaving for work, he was mugged and shot three times in his hands and arm. 

Due to his injuries he was unable to continue working, and in May of 2008, after about six months of living on the money he had been able to put away during his employment, he again found himself homeless.  However, Alan’s previous experience had taught him where he could go to find the resources he needed to survive. 

Instead of landing on the street he went directly to the Community for Creative Non Violence, one of the largest shelters in the country, where he resides today.  When he isn’t working on rehabilitation from his injuries, he is busy working to find employment through a program that helps to place veterans back into the work force.  Eventually he hopes to re-enter the fields of law enforcement and instruction, but his most important personal goal is to reconnect with his children, a doctor and an engineer in their mid twenties.  The one idea he wants to pass on to young people through the Faces of Homelessness Speakers Bureau is that “Homelessness doesn’t have a set face.  Sometimes homelessness just happens.”