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Years ago, artist Bill Mangum befriended a homeless, mentally ill man who then turned up for his Sunday school class — to a mixed reception.

Some church members embraced Michael Saavedra, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia; others were repulsed, wanting no contact with him, even privately asking Mangum to stop him from coming to church.

When Saavedra later died at 38 of a brain aneurysm, Mangum recalled, the service was standing room only.

“For months, people would call me in tears,” Mangum said, “racked with guilt because they hadn’t done anything to help him.”

For the Greensboro painter, who will address the state’s Mental Health Association gathering in Wilmington next week, that long-ago friendship began a two-decade partnership with Greensboro Urban Ministry that has raised more than $1 million.

But what may matter as much as the financial success of the Christmas “Honor Card” campaign is what Mangum does on Wednesday mornings: He helps serve breakfast next door to the homeless shelter, at Potter’s House.

“Meeting Michael Saavedra had the greatest impact on my life,” Mangum said last week about the man who inspired one of his first snowy Christmas card scenes. “I was more the beneficiary than he was.”

I was thinking of Saavedra’s story last week while reading the latest piece of bad news dropped on the doorstep about North Carolina’s troubled mental health system — federal decertification of Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro. A spate of negligence and abuse allegations at the 274-bed facility led officials to conclude the hospital poses a “danger” to its patients.

Lately, the dispatches from the mental health system have grown so grim — lack of community services, astronomical cost overruns, poor oversight — that it’s enough to make us question what on earth we can do.

Here is one answer, and it won’t cost a dime: A new idea developed by Family Service of the Piedmont will match people who have been chronically homeless and mentally ill with churches organizing “Hope Teams.”

Unlike the caretaker role Mangum ultimately played for Saavedra, these volunteers won’t provide groceries, shelter or financial support. Instead, they will give something else many mentally ill people lack: friendship.

“Loneliness is a major factor,” said Jehan Benton, a program director at Family Service of the Piedmont. “All of us need some kind of encouragement in our lives. We need to know that somebody cares.”

The first Hope Teams, which begin in October at First Lutheran and Westminster Presbyterian, will consist of about five people who will stay in contact with those making the transition from homelessness to an apartment.

But the teams won’t provide for physical needs — what one homeless advocate termed the familiar “Mother Bountiful” role churches often play — but the need for simple social contact.

A game of cards. A bargain matinee or free concert. A phone call.

A veteran clinician for the Guilford Center, the county’s mental health agency, said the combination of chronic homelessness and mental illness leaves many people cut off from the community, all but invisible.

“It’s kind of a vicious cycle. The illness can cause the isolation, and the isolation can make the symptoms of the illness worse,” said Wes Early, a mental health specialist. “When people feel like they don’t belong, they can begin to think, 'Nobody cares about me. Life’s not worth living.’ ”

Mangum recalled the first time he saw his friend after Saavedra was hit by a car and hospitalized in Butner. Stabilized and on medication, he was a different person.

“He was the neatest guy,” Mangum said. “It gave me such encouragement and hope. People can really live good lives if they get help they need.”

Contact Lorraine at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com