From Living Under a Bridge to Building Bridges for People

Every few months, Robert Hamilton walks under the Derry Veterans Memorial Bridge and stares at the place he once called home.

The bridge in Derry, Westmoreland County, is a reminder of where he came from. And it is inspiration for his work today.

Before he became the suited director of the Westmoreland County Department of Human Services, overseeing a $300 million budget, Hamilton was a disheveled veteran living in a tent in the woods just beyond the bridge and the railroad tracks. On rainy nights, when his tent became drenched, he would seek cover under the bridge. Some days police in the tiny town where he grew up would chase him away.

Fifteen years ago he was a 20–year–old military veteran addicted to heroin and opioids, living on the streets. “It was survival,” he said.

Recovering from substance–use disorder and rebuilding his life has given him empathy for those requiring human services. Hamilton was named the Director of the Westmoreland County Department of Human Services in 2021, after an executive search funded by the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

The Foundation also in 2023 awarded the department $350,000 to begin implementing a shared–data system between the Department’s divisions of Aging, Behavioral Health and Developmental Services including Early Intervention; Community Relations and Prevention; and Veterans’ Affairs; and also its Children’s Bureau, in hopes the technology will improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of the services they provide.

“We have to put all of this together and understand that each person represents a story and each story represents a distressed area and each area has to have its own unique strategy. The way to do that effectively is to have that data and fund those areas of need—crisis support, suicide support,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton’s story starts with generational poverty and trauma. His mother had three kids before she was 20, got divorced and remarried. The family constantly moved when rent was due. “We ended up living in a cottage with no running water.”

After high school, he joined the Army National Guard as a military police officer. One day, as he was testing a weapons system, a .50– caliber rifle misfired and blew out the hearing in his right ear. The doctor gave him opiates and he became addicted.

By age 20, he was back in Derry, living on the streets, selling drugs and dodging police. There was no homeless shelter or other services. “Barely anybody knew,” he was homeless, Hamilton said. “If they saw me, I would pass it off like I was camping.”

The threat of a long prison sentence when his friends were caught in a crime jolted him into change. He entered a drug–treatment program called Pyramid HealthCare. After attending a church service, he knew he had a higher purpose and stopped using drugs in 2010.

Then he made up for lost time. Hamilton enrolled in the Community College of Westmoreland County, then received his bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Pittsburgh. Now he is finishing a doctorate in instructional leadership and management at Robert Morris University.

He worked at Pyramid, giving others the help he once had received, and then worked as Executive Director of Veterans Place of Washington Boulevard.

Hamilton is a bearded, cheerful man with the broad shoulders of the high school football player he once was. Dr. Seuss tattoos cover almost every inch of his right arm — he had once planned to go into early–childhood education, but now the tattoos also hold meaning for their references to his bond with his two children.

He loves his job—except for the part where he has to wear a suit.

But even that has its reminders of Hamilton’s past. The blue jacket has American flags and a date embroidered inside—XI II X—representing November 2, 2010, the day he got clean and turned his life around.