In America, the average age of a homeless person is just nine years old. For the people at Community Chest, in Virginia City, Nevada, this is a dire statistic that means nothing less than the failure of our communities. This episode of The Visionaries takes viewers to two different parts of the U.S.: to the west, where Community Chest is working to build a sense of community so that the people they serve never reach such a critical point as homelessness, and to the east, where Vilmaria Harvey, a homeless mother of three, struggles to survive in a motel room in Framingham, Massachusetts. In the six months that they followed Vilmaria, The Visionaries crew watched as her children were taken from her by the state and as her oldest son was hospitalized after suffering a breakdown. While Vilmaria and the staff at Community Chest have never met, together their two stories show the power of caring-and how devastating life can be without it.
