When Ray Maun was released from the hospital just five days after an overdose, he had nowhere to go. It was a cold December morning in 2022, and Maun was experiencing homelessness for the second time in D.C. He walked to Christ House, a 24-hour medical facility for people experiencing homelessness, and knocked on the door. Maun had first been a patient at Christ House six months earlier after Dr. Janelle Goetcheus met him and offered to take him to the center for diabetes treatment.
At the clinic, Maun got a heart stent and brought his sugar levels under control. He attended Christ House’s intensive substance use recovery program and church services. After seven months, he was offered membership to the Kairos long-term recovery and housing program, through which he now lives in his apartment. He still volunteers at Christ House every day.
Maun credits his recovery to Dr. Goetcheus, who not only brought him to Christ House but founded the program in 1985.
“If it hadn’t been for her and the first time, I might not be alive today,” Maun said. “Oh my God, she was just so loving.”
Dr. Goetcheus, a physician who profoundly shaped health care for people experiencing homelessness in the District, passed away on Oct. 26 at 84 years old. During her decades of service, Dr. Goetcheus revolutionized the city’s health resources for low-income residents and showed compassion and care to all her patients.
The D.C. Council is expected to pass a ceremonial resolution in honor of Dr. Goetcheus on Dec. 3.
After earning her medical degree from Indiana University School of Medicine in 1965, Dr. Goetcheus planned to become a missionary and move to Pakistan with her husband and children. While waiting for her visa in Washington, Dr. Goetcheus visited the first low-income Jubilee Housing building. When residents told her about the lack of health care available to them, she decided her impact could be made much closer to home and moved to the District in 1976.
From 1977 to 1981, Dr. Goetcheus founded or helped found several health clinics for poor and homeless District residents, including Crossroad Health Ministry, Community of Hope, Columbia Road Health Services, and SOME (So Others Might Eat).
While treating patients, Dr. Goetcheus realized people experiencing homelessness had more complex needs than could be addressed by clinics alone. After she saw that hospitals discharged uninsured patients more quickly than others, she saw the importance of offering homeless patients a space to rest, live, and recover from procedures or illnesses.
With this vision, Dr. Goetcheus founded Christ House, the first live-in medical facility in the nation where homeless people could recover from their medical ailments, in 1985. In the last 40 years, over 10,000 patients have been admitted.
Lawrence Bush knew Dr. Goetcheus for 16 years and said she made everyone feel seen and cared for. He first came to Christ House in 2008 when he was experiencing homelessness and skin cancer. He later joined the Kairos program and met Dr. Goetcheus at one of the program’s group meetings, and then again during his work as a homeless care provider with patients at Christ House.
“She loved everybody, she cared for people. Addicted, incarcerated, whatever, her legacy was that she cared,” Bush said.
The same year Christ House opened, Dr. Goetcheus co-founded and became the first medical director of D.C.’s then-new Health Care for the Homeless project. The project provided primary health care services to unhoused families and individuals from a small room in a local shelter. Thirteen years later, the program was renamed Unity Health Care as it expanded to serve all District residents regardless of ability to pay. Today, it is the District’s largest community health center network, with more than 20 units across seven wards.
Brian Carome, Street Sense’s CEO, met Dr. Goetcheus several times in the mid-1980s while working in social services and homeless services. He said she transformed the services available to the homeless community in D.C.
“It’s hard to overstate how much of a difference Christ House made back then and continues to make,” Carome said. “Prior to its opening, a lot of people just died because they were released from the hospital, and their living conditions didn’t permit them to get better.”
A celebration of life was held for Dr. Goetcheus on Nov. 16 at Trinity University’s Notre Dame Chapel. Born on Sept. 19, 1940, in Indianapolis, Dr. Goetcheus was a mother of three and grandma of eight. She is survived by all her children and grandchildren and her husband of 59 years, Rev. Allen Goetcheus.
Her daughter, Anne Goetcheus, said at the service her mother “would have hated all of this fuss about her. But she would have loved that it brought so many people from different facets of her life together in community.”
A physician herself, Anne Goetcheus said she tries to instill the compassion her mom taught her in the residents she teaches.
“Mom taught us, by example, to be prayerful, work hard, and be servant leaders, to be humble. And that we are all children of God and to love each other unconditionally,” she said.
Anne Goetcheus was able to see her mom in action because Christ House wasn’t just a home for patients; Dr. Goetcheus and her family purposefully lived in the same building as the people she cared for. At the memorial, Mary Jordan, Christ House’s chief nursing officer who had known Dr. Goetcheus for 38 years, said she had always wanted to be close to those she cared for, showing everyone they were equal members of the same community.
“She wanted to be present to the pain,” Jordan said. “This is also Janelle’s work, to break down the barriers that separate us.”
