Street roots., June 29, 2018, Page 10, Image 10

Street Roots • June 29-July 5, 2018
Rural Housing
Page 11
SHELTER, from page 10
monthly stipend.
Outside the Tillamook shelter, vegetables
for resident meals grow in newly
constructed garden beds, and children run
around a playground, complete with jungle
gyms, slides and swings. Several reentry
program residents congregated on the back
porch.
“In Newport, they need a Helping Hands
for girls,” said a woman, extinguishing her
cigarette before she rushed inside to keep
the cake from burning.
hose in reentry learn how to find and
apply for jobs, which in Seaside and
many other coastal towns is fairly easy
because the demand for employees
outweighs the supply. It helps that Evans’
Seaside office building is shared with an
employment agency.
After demonstrating the nonprofit’s
database that updates daily bed counts and
tracks client demographics, Brown scrolled
down a list of the hundreds of classes that
participants were offered last year -
everything from resume writing and healthy
house them. We feel like we’re staring down
cooking to parenting and coping skills, as
the end of a barrel at the moment.”
well as specialized job training programs
To ease the burden, Helping Hands has
tailored to area industries.
purchased the five story Uniontown
“I have heard from our farmers that
Boarding House building in Astoria that will
they’ve had really good experiences hiring
serve as its 12th facility and the only year-
people from Helping Hands,” said Sarah
round shelter appropriate for families in
Beaubien, an executive at Tillamook County
town.
Creamery Association. “We have a ton of
“Astoria has lost almost all of its
respect for that organization.” She hopes to
manufacturing. That’s one contributor to
develop a training program at Helping
why there’s a lot of homelessness,” said
Hands that will allow participants to easily
Elaine Bruce, executive director of Clatsop
segway from Helping Hands to jobs at the
Community Action in Astoria. Her agency is
creamery.
working with Helping Hands to fund the
Once participants are employed, they pay
building’s remodel. When it opens this fall,
$200 a month in rent, which helps cover
it will provide 65 to 70 beds.
overhead costs. With 190 beds and some
While about half of the
flexibility for adding
families Bruce works with
more when it has
in Clatsop County are
to, Evans said
""There has always been a lust- locals, the other half are
Helping Hands
not. “It’s amazing, we
never turns people dameatal inequity of income
have people that just show
away from its
to housing cost 1st Lincoln
up here and they’ll say,
emergency
C ounty/' said lones. Bnt when ‘we don’t have any job but
shelters.
yon combine that w ith Lincoln we wanted to live by the
“Each of our
County's economic decline 1« ocean,”’ Bruce said. “And
facilities has
fishing and tim b e r along w ith they’ll pull up with a car
overflow that we
its above average rate of drag full of kids.”
hope we never
touch, but at times
and alcohol abuse, she said,
we have to,” he
""yon get this powder feeg/?
said.
hile Helping Hands
In recent years,
operates
an eight-
or
however, Brown
bed men’s program in
said, “We have
Lincoln County, it’s primarily for inmates
been concerned at the capacity we’ve been
exiting out of state prisons.
operating.”
Along that stretch of coastline, there are
Last year, Helping Hands saw an 18
percent increase in seniors and a 30 percent no year-round shelters for single adults or
unaccompanied youths experiencing
increase in families accessing its services.
homeless, but a family-centered program is
“We can see an increase,” said Evans. “I
think more people are in need of the service achieving an equally-high rate of success
with its formerly homeless graduates.
because more people are falling out of the
In Newport, Samaritan House offers
system .... 19 percent of the people that
families a 10-month program. It too operates
walk in our door have a full-time job. Think
efficiently, with a yearly budget of $150,000.
about that.”
This is in part because the Presbyterian
Brown said she worries a new cannery
Church deeded the nonprofit the apartment
opening up in Clatsop County, along with
building where it houses the 11 families in
the new Walmart in Warrenton, will worsen
its program.
the situation. “We’re just looking at all these
Its director, Lola Jones, said old
people that they’re going to try to employ,
promotional material from the shelter
and we’re wondering where they re going to
T
W
Gary Carlson
manages Helping
Hands Tillamook
Reentry House. He
credits the nonprofit
with giving him a
reason to live.
Carlson is pictured
here in the Helping
Hands garden.
P H O T O BY E M IL Y
GREEN
indicated it typically had about 50 families
on its waitlist before she took the helm in
2012 at the age of 26.
Today, there are 250 families waiting to
get in.
“Most are coming from their cars, tents,
abandoned buildings - it’s a reality that’s
difficult to sit with every night because I see
the drawer full of applications and I know
what’s happening,” said Jones. “There’s a
huge temptation to go quicker than the
process will allow, but everyone who lives
here deserves every second of this
program.”
While Helping Hands will make decisions
about failed drug tests on an individual
basis, because Samaritan House works with
Oregon Department of Human Services,
Jones adheres to a strict zero-tolerance
policy.
“In this post-financial crisis reality, the
reason you are homeless has a lot to do with
how you were brought up,” said Jones. “We
see a lot of the multi-generational poverty
element, but also see a lot of people who
are ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with
life in poverty because they weren’t brought
up in poverty.”
Residents are required to come up with a
$100 refundable deposit for their
apartments, put 60 percent of their take-
home pay into a savings account that Jones
oversees, and for the last six months they
enter into a legal lease agreement, which
builds rental history.
“We’re trying to mimic what the real
world feels like, but on an accessible level,”
said Jones. But for the first 30 days, all her
families have to do is come up with a case
plan. “This de-escalates their crisis brain
and gets them thinking in a long-term
sense,” she said.
More than 85 percent of her clients are
single parent households - mostly moms.
“I had a mom here, she was working in
middle management at Taco Bell, barely
making enough to pay for child care. One of
her paychecks she actually owed more to
her childcare provider than was on her
check,” Jones said. But that woman was able
to get her certified nursing certificate while
she was staying at Samaritan House, and
now she supports her family with a better
paying job in Corvallis.
“There has always been a fundamental
inequity of income to housing cost in
Lincoln County - there always has been,”
said Jones.
But when you combine that with Lincoln
County’s economic decline in fishing and
timber, along with its above average rate of
drug and alcohol abuse, Jones said, “you get
this powder keg.”
Of Samaritan House families that
graduate, 80 percent are still in housing one
year later.
bout a half hour north of Newport,
Family Promise of Lincoln City is able to
shelter about 14 people at a time. It doesn’t
have an overnight shelter, so it partners
with 12 local churches where families in its
program sleep at night. Each morning, a van
picks them up and brings them to the
nonprofit’s facility, which has a kitchen,
showers, living room, play room and offices.
Family Promise is a national model based
on networking, building relationships and
trauma-informed care.
Like Helping Hands and Samaritan
House, sobriety and active participation is
required, although it serves as more of an
emergency shelter than long-term program.
When there’s availability, director Elizabeth
Reyes said she sends families south to
Samaritan House. About 80 percent of the
families she shelters are able to maintain
housing after they exit, she said.
Reyes said the majority of people who live
in Lincoln City year-round are one to two
paychecks away from needing her services.
“All it takes is a car repair,” she said.
A
em ily@streetroots. org
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