[Music] tonight we were out feeding and for those of you who don't know me I cook for open doors Family Promise emergency shelter and I see houseless children every day I know Family Promise is an amazing program and the children are safe and on their way to housing I see those children and it makes me sad that we have so many families struggling but tonight when I was feeding I ran into a family in a car when I walked to the window this little angel popped up her head she said to me ma'am may I have a sandwich I'm very hungry I smile at her and gave her the whole bag I told her I'd be back and as I walked away I couldn't stop the tears my heart broke for this beautiful dirty face child I saw the shame of the parents and my heart broke for them as well when I came back after I compose myself the mom gave me a hug with tears pouring down her face I gave her my card and assured her that if all the food we gathered ran out to call me and I would bring more I touched that little girl's hand and I wanted to scream I see you and I care the little girl's face can't be unseen I cannot get her off my heart and off my mind I want a hug her to take off all my clothes and give them to her I don't care what she needs I'll find it I want to see that child smile it only took a sandwich and some cookies and she smiled at me and I knew I'd be seeing her a lot I need her to know that I care but I can't walk past her and not notice [Music] tonight I've gone over every reason that I do this heartbreak is real and brutal I cry myself to sleep a lot over other struggles but sometimes it's almost breathtaking I feel like I can't breathe and sadness my old friend comes to visit I have to remember why I do this without people who help without judgement there can't be a good outcome this mom had nothing left to hope for nothing left to believe in and tonight I was the person that let her know that there are people out there who see you and who care [Music] you know a dream is like a river ever changing as it flows and the dream is just a vessel that must follow of where it goes beautiful lyrics beautiful music by my favorite theologian Garth Brooks the river Garth Brooks things about is a river of dreams but the river we need to look at is a little different it's a river of homelessness a river of homeless men women and children that flows like a subterranean river just beneath the surface of our community for the most part it flows out of sight through the alleys and parts and homeless shelters of our city you and I only get occasional glimpses of it the panhandler on the street corner holding up a sign the person sleeping in a doorway of a downtown business the handful of people living out of a backpack and hanging out at a local Starbucks the occasional person pushing their worldly belongings in a shopping cart you've seen them but there's more that you and I don't see like the more than three thousand homeless school students couchsurfing with friends it's called being doubled up or the recently homeless family trying hard not to be conspicuous as they sleep in their car in the local park this river also includes the 7,000 people who showed up at the Spokane veterans arena on a Tuesday in November to pick up a free Thanksgiving meal they're part of this River too you see there what's happening upstream but we as a community haven't made the connection yet that those struggling families may prove to be the upstream reservoir of tomorrow's street homeless ever ask yourself just how wide and deep this river of homelessness might be just how many people are we talking about as part of this documentary we wanted to take a fresh look at the number of homeless in our larger community but we were immediately confronted with a problem you see how we define homelessness determines how many homeless people we count for example the annual point in time count sponsored and required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines homelessness in narrow terms sheltered and unsheltered in other words you're homeless if you're staying in a homeless shelter or transitional housing or if you're unsheltered and sleeping under a bridge somewhere but under the mckinney-vento act which tracks homeless school students the Department of Education defines homelessness as not living in your own permanent residence including being doubled up or couchsurfing with family or friends I think the biggest piece of it that I would like others to understand about families that at least that I work with is these aren't the families that we think of oh they're out on the streets they're sleeping under a bridge these are families that are doubled up staying you know three generations in a family because they don't have someplace else or they're staying with friends that maybe they just met last month and which puts themselves in their kids at risk because they don't know them well enough they don't know their background they don't know what's going on but it's better than sleeping on the streets these aren't the traditional what we think of as as the homeless population these are families with kids that are walking their kids to school every day that are coming to parent-teacher conferences that are you know hanging out and picking up their kids after school they might be standing next to me you don't know that they're struggling let's illustrate this from the Spokane Valley the 2019 point in time count showed only 30 homeless individuals in the Spokane Valley but according to the mckinney-vento homeless liaisons whose job it is to track these things Spokane Valley school districts reported 819 homeless students during the 2018-2019 school year when we add in family members those 819 students become more than 1200 individuals experiencing homelessness in the Spokane Valley in any way you do the math 30 homeless individuals in the Spokane Valley represents a serious undercount on the order of 1 in 40 and the difference is the definitions of homelessness used by two official counts and what's happening in the Spokane Valley among homeless students and their families is happening in school districts all across our community as we began developing this documentary we asked local homeless shelters along with the city of Spokane community housing and homeless services department to provide us with their unduplicated numbers of people who passed through the shelter systems of the city during each of 3 years 2016 2017 and 2018 by unduplicated we mean that we're making a serious effort not to inflate the number by counting the same people multiple times and trust me an accurate unduplicated count is a bigger challenge than you might think next we included numbers for local area school students also experiencing homelessness as tracked by school districts and reported to the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction we also made allowances for their families after all if the kids are homeless chances are pretty good that the whole family is homeless finally we compared our revised numbers with those recorded by each year's official point in time count the results caught our attention for 2016 our numbers showed a total of eleven thousand 832 individuals experiencing homelessness in greater Spokane but the point in time count for that year recorded only nine hundred eighty-one or about eight percent of our numbers for 2017 our number showed eleven thousand four hundred seventy-one while the appointed time count recorded only a thousand ninety-four 2018 our numbers were eleven thousand three hundred and nineteen against a point in time count of a thousand two hundred forty five when we averaged our annual totals into a three year average we found a three year average of eleven thousand five hundred forty one individuals experiencing homelessness against a point in time count of a thousand one hundred and five here's the disturbing take away in an average year we officially count roughly one in ten people experiencing homelessness in the greater Spokane area now these numbers suggest a compelling reason while we're having such a difficult time moving the needle when it comes to meaningfully addressing homelessness in our community the issue is much larger than we understand and these larger numbers quite possibly represent the upstream source of future street homelessness the numbers strongly argue that homelessness is a large subterranean river that flows through our community and caught up in this river of homelessness like human flotsam are the moms dads and kids all experiencing homelessness as a family welcome to the hidden homeless my name is Rigney danger and I am eight years old and I got a Logan elementary I live at st. Margaret's shelter we're living set you're actually martyrs for five months now all the people here they're really nice there's like stuff like people will go will like do beating bingo lots of stuff I like to like paint draw that's what I love doing I love doing art and stuff I'm looking forward to getting a house I want to get like a duplex or like a apartment or something sometimes when my mom comes in the kitchen without me I'm like I worried that she's gonna get hurt or something her name is Kelly and she is a very nice person and very sweet and kind I want to protect my mom at all times because I love her homeless families are the hidden homeless of our community so hidden that we as a community have more than 3000 homeless students in our local school systems along with their families without ever knowing about them these families aren't sleeping on sidewalks downtown or panhandling on street corners or camping on the steps of City Hall they're just trying to get their lives back well most people think about homelessness in our community they flash on that guy pushing the shopping cart downtown maybe suffering from mental illness maybe suffering from addiction maybe both that's what people flash on when they think about homelessness the truth is the vast overwhelming majority of our homeless are not that guy the vast overwhelming majority of our homeless are families their moms and dads with kids and they're sleeping in cars they're sleeping in shelters sometimes they're sleeping in tents they're couch surfing with their friends this is the true epidemic of homelessness in our community the most visually noticeable part of homelessness that we see are that are the folks we see downtown the chronic street homeless but the actual overwhelming majority of our homeless are families hi I am I kelly shoots I'm 36 years old and I'm living at st. Margaret's shelter currently with my eight-year-old son Rigby we've been here for about five months it's been it's been a journey I'd say everything kind of started a couple years back I was in a really bad DV relationship and I lost my kids do too I kept going back to him and the kids were eventually taken out of the home because it was an unsafe environment so there was a lot of stuff that happened in between then and now I just got custody back up my son Rigby in March so when I was in my 20s I had issues with addiction and being having nowhere to go and losing my children that kind of brought up those addiction issues again and that was a very huge struggle being on heroin and off heroin st. Margaret so I think is the final step or was the final step to me getting my children so for me st. Margaret's has been a huge thing in my life I had to have like a stable living situation in order for me to get custody back of Rigby and because this place you know st. Margaret's gave me that I was able to get my son back which just been a huge game-changer in my life he is you know everything to me is my motivation for everything I do in life every single day every day I wake up you know I eat sleep breathe Rigby you know and that state margaret's helps me tremendously with that and you know not only have they given us a place to stay here for the past five months you know we have a month left but they're giving us a housing voucher and with that housing voucher we're gonna be able to get an apartment or you know a duplex or something along those lines and so they're really going to be sticking with us for a long time let's try a little exercise let's pretend for a few minutes that you and your family are homeless you've exhausted your friends and family and have been officially kicked off the couch and asked to leave and go solve your problem now you really don't know what you're gonna do other than sleeping in your car you basically have two options the first is to find a walk-in shelter where you and your family might find immediate help that's where a shelter like Family Promise open doors might help assuming of course that they haven't reached their capacity for that night and are having to turn people away that's how Gregory Greer and his daughter Savannah found themselves at Family Promise open door shelter great agree is my name this is my daughter Savannah Goodman I'm 32 years old and I'm from st. Louis Missouri so what happened was me and my parents was I mean we wasn't saying I died I lost my wife my daughter mother had died so I wanted a big change so I could have stayed in st. Louis so I moved to Utah met my girlfriend you know I'm saying then we moved to Spokane Washington and everything didn't go to a plan so we end up at the shelter try to go from there and I'm staying here I mean I see things getting better you know family promise is a national organization that service families experiencing homelessness and for the past two years Family Promise of Spokane has operated the open doors 24/7 family emergency shelter I'm Jo aider I'm the executive director of Family Promise of Spokane really our mission is to end the cycle of homelessness for families in this community when we meet people we usually meet them on their worst day the day they become homeless with children and so they are hurting they are tired they're ashamed and we really want to pour into them equip them to bring them to a point to where they are happy they are healthy they are thriving in their lives in the community and so that's our mission hi someone said that if I come down you might possibly be able to help me I'm homeless your second option as a family experiencing homelessness would be a little more involved because it means getting you and your family entered into something called the homeless family coordinated assessment system or hfca-- for short it's a homeless database operated by Catholic Charities that prioritizes families according to the severity of their needs and then works to identify the potential resources available to meet that need HF CA is the homeless families coordinated assessment system that starts the process for homeless families who need help through our system we see different families all the time and depending on what their level of need is some folks have higher needs than others and that's why we have the assessment tool and that really gives us a good idea on what the need that family has so if the score is a little bit higher than those needs are just a little bit higher so we're gonna grab folks first that have more higher scores out of the assessment tool then folks who don't because they have higher barriers to overcome before they can get permanently housed I also do diversion and diversion is a new program into Spokane and what we're trying to do is we're trying to divert families from coming into the system meaning these families may have a three-day pair vacate they have may have a 10-day vacate or they may just be a little bit behind on their rent and what we do is we try to keep them where they're at here's the difference a family experiencing homelessness can roll in on fumes walk in the door it family promise open doors and stay in the emergency family shelter if there's room but to get into st. Margaret's shelter a family first has to go through an hfca-- interview and have their needs evaluated by a caseworker who can then refer them out to services including st. Margaret altar st. Margaret's is a full Family Shelter here in Spokane we have emergency and transitional housing and we take referrals for families that come through our coordinated assess a program that need that emergency service so families will come into our shelter and stay anywhere from 30 days maybe they'll stay 60 days our average right now is about 63 days that will have family staying in our shelter so we have about last year in 2018 we had about 90 percent of our of our families that were here were single moms with kiddos in the shelter so you see that reflected in the demographics of the families that come through our doors it's it's a historically even though we've been full family as we've seen and the majority of them still being single mom so kiddos Family Promise in st. Margaret's representing the two primary options available to families experiencing homelessness in the Spokane area now a third option for a family experiencing homelessness would be the Salvation Army so the families that come to us here the Salvation Army we have a variety inputs for them but the families coming here if they're on the street they move into our emergency shelter housing and those families are ones that are living in their car or living on the street boyfriend's taken off girlfriends taken off they have children it's a family shelter and so they come and move into our our shelter and then from there we help them get back on their feet either by getting a job or finding the right public assistance they can get to to get into permanent supportive housing we have an emergency shelter we have 12 units for emergency housing so for that type of situation for emergency placement of a family we can do 12 families at a time and they typically stay with us 45 days to 90 days Union Gospel Mission runs a shelter for women and children but it doesn't allow families moms and dads with kids to stay together women and children go to one shelter while men go to the men's shelter and for a family already experiencing the trauma of homelessness separating parents from kids is simply one more trauma in an already bad day if we as a community are going to genuinely address the river of hidden homeless that flows through our community we're gonna have to do better our families are our future and a significant number of our family are in trouble [Music] I think the biggest misconception about people that are homeless is that they've done something to create their situation or that they're all maybe struggling with addiction not always that's that can be an issue but that's not always the case that somehow they've done something to get themselves in that position and I think a lot of us want to think that so that we can maybe not feel guilty about it or worry about it so much and become involved it's there's just so many factors that play into this people find themselves evicted from their house for various reasons but I think we just need to look at everyone as you know a human being that deserves respect and they have some problems they need to work through and these are families in our community and these children deserve it children don't ask to be homeless they're there they don't have addiction problems so we need to really help the parents help the children if we took a moment to be honest with ourselves you and I will probably discover that each of us has a mental picture our own private misconception of a typical homeless person who they are and how they became homeless and there's certainly homeless individuals out there who would fit whatever misconception we may have but the reality is that the river of homelessness that flows through our community is far more diverse than any stereotype we may have embraced my name is Christina Janine Lee and I'm from Carson City Nevada I'm 25 years old my birthday is April 23rd and 1994 so that means I turned 25 this year I actually moved to California in 2006 when my mom and dad divorced I've done a lot of hopping back between Santa Rosa California and Carson City throughout my youth my mom was a victim of domestic violence with my dad and there is always a lot of chaos going on and there's never a dull moment when I turned around 16 I tried to move with my dad didn't work out he's really rude and narcissistic and controlling and doesn't see anyone other than himself so I moved back to California and then I was around 17 already a teen mom I had my son Victor I didn't like the way my mother treated me verbally she was really abusive and when I had enough I snapped and I put hands on her and ended up leaving I gave my son to his grandfather for a few weeks and that was my first real experience of homelessness at 17 to be homeless it's some days are easier than others [Music] I [Music] it hurts me because I have three kids and I didn't think outside of the box that hey I'm gonna be raising my kids out of a shelter hanging out at the park all day taking the bus everywhere I didn't plan for this but I love my kids unconditionally so I don't consider myself homeless as long as I have my kids with me I'm at home my daughter calls the shelter her home she says mom are we going home and home is with my kids I'm not home as long as I have my children with me and it it has it's hard days when I feel a burden of having all the stress of getting to the appointments and getting all night right now it's summer so I don't have to worry about school but schools coming around the corner school shopping and I'm fortunate to have met a lot of great people where I'm staying at right now in the shelter that they have been so amazing their children has a great impact on me and I've made lifelong friends in the situation I'm in because without them I'd be sitting on the curb not knowing what I'm gonna do not knowing if I have to go back to prostitution or just to try to get a room for my kids to sleep in and so I'm really grateful for places like this that can help me from going back so what I don't want to do volunteering with Family Promise has really changed my outlook homelessness in our community and just the Buried stories of the families I had no idea what some of the challenges and barriers they had that they have to go through and when I I was coming to volunteer at the shelter with my husband and one of my students at our school walked in with his dad and there was a bit of surprise on both of our faces and again it just kind of hits home for me since these are students I see at work and I come to my volunteer job here and run into them as well and so I can see full circle what they are experiencing through their school day and then when they're struggling with with homelessness where they're gonna sleep and where they're gonna eat that night we were able to help them get something to eat get some dinner because they hadn't had anything to eat and just help them get situated for the night there's not such a thing as typical homeless and so a lot of people think of homeless and they'll think of the guy that's standing underneath the bridge with the sign what they don't think about our families they don't think about a mom and kids or mom and dad and kids are a dad and a daughter who are also homeless in our community they're the hidden homeless of our community you don't see them out there so you don't think of them and so there's not a typical type of homeless and there's also not a typical type of family homelessness I would say there's only two common denominators in homelessness in our community one is there's a loss of community there's a loss of relationships either you never had them that you can lean back on or something that you did something that as somebody else did broke the relationships that you had that you can depend on or and the other thing that's involved is some type of childhood trauma we will often see adults and children that are dealing with backgrounds of abuse and neglect that then result in homelessness as an adult as well as other mental health and other issues that are involved with that my name is Stacy Salazar I work at Family Promise sister of open doors 24-hour homeless shelter I became a supervisor with open doors I started off of assistant and then now I'm a supervisor for the afternoon shift it's the busiest shift I grew up in Wyoming was born in Salt Lake City I grew up in Wyoming pretty much my whole life in 2004 December 12 2004 my mom passed away the landlord wouldn't rent to me so after that I was pretty much homeless was my children and my kids is dad we bounce back and forth never really had a stable home I was almost for 14 years 14 years is a hard it was a long one but this last time I was literally homeless with no family no relatives to stay with it was more of a you got to do something you got to you got to put your big-girl pants on and figure out and as a single mom you have to figure out what you're doing wrong and then handle what you got handle I'd go two weeks a month without eating to make sure my kids ate my name is Amy Robinson I am the lead case manager of open doors Family Shelter it's a program of Family Promise of Spokane I have been working for open doors for a little over two years I see myself in the journeys that these families are on I've experienced a lot of the same adversities that these families have experienced I was a homeless youth at one point I which is couchsurfing youth is at one point I got pregnant very young and I was a single mom without a home at one point so I I see myself in many of these families stories and I feel like I can kind of go on their journey too becoming stable again in their life and I'm there for them and I can help them kind of find their way no one plans to be homeless and no one plans to end up sleeping here this is where the hidden homeless sleep if they're fortunate enough to be here rather than sleeping in their car this is the sleeping area here at Family Promise open doors family shelter keep in mind this is an emergency shelter not transitional housing and before Family Promise opened the shelter two years ago many of these families had no choice but to sleep in their car were worse tonight 60 moms dads and kiddos will sleep on mats on this floor can you imagine your family sleeping on this floor in close quarters on mats alongside 50 other homeless family members yeah me neither as we filmed this in mid 2019 America's experiencing justified outrage over migrant kids and families sleeping on mats and on floors but where's our outrage that homeless families right here in Spokane have to sleep in these conditions families belong in homes kids belong in beds these moms dads and kiddos are the hidden homeless the human flotsam in the unseen river of homelessness that flows through our community whose fault is this your fault it's my fault it's our fault because we as a community have chosen to turn a blind eye to the reality of what's happening right here in our own community to these families and to many more who remain the hidden homeless it's hard because it said because you homeless like you have nowhere to go you know I'm saying working then I have no daycare so that's actually struggled in trying to do girls her that's out of my field so I'm trying you know my top three things to get me out of stretch is finding daycare is number one in the job and in a house or apartment daycare is kind of scary for me because if you watch the news you will see kids getting beat or getting mistreated or not been treated right and that scares me because I love my daughter and I don't want to be another victim of someone else kid getting mistreated I just moved out here I have no car at the moment so I don't know where nothing is at this moment so the best thing looking at my phone looking around trying to do this trying to get things in place Bernard about two months and it's very hard getting around in the city being mobile don't have no car so if it's raining outside you know understand but if I didn't have my daughter out here it would be more easier but it's not nobody's job besides to me to get that done it's not uncommon to hear people who have never experienced genuine homelessness to say something like why do these people do with the rest of us do get a job find a place solve a problem people who have never experienced homelessness don't understand that homelessness is a hole that's much harder to get out of than it is to get into which is why preventing homelessness is so much cheaper than solving homelessness and families working to get back to some form of stability faced obstacles that you and I don't the obstacles I see most are his employment issues childcare issues my mom wants to work and she's got small kids and when she looks at the cost of childcare and even work what's supplied she can't do it or you can't do it oh it doesn't work for their hours that they're that they're employed for another part of that would do transportation if the person has no vehicle to get from point A to point B and there haven't used the bus a drive or a trip to chop to work the child caring home in a car might take them 15 minutes but if you're on the bus it could take you a hour hour-and-a-half and then when you add inclement one you know bad weather it makes it worse so transportation is a big issue and it's not always something you can easily solve with a bus there's always gonna be barriers in terms of the basic needs not being met even though people will assume that there are food pantries there are places to get formula there are places to get diapers there are places to get clothing but there's still moms and dads that come into the shelter who say my children has been walking around for the past four days without shoes they lost one of their shoes or my I'm out of formula now and even though there is WIC but there still is kind of a disconnect there they have to get to WIC or if they're not used to being in Spokane and there used to with that rape resource they're still kind of navigating that so there really is a transitional period of figuring out where the resources are and how to utilize the resources that are here and yeah that's that still goes on today even for basic needs it is book the ghetto the garden and the gospel about poverty in America Joe aider explains some of the obstacles families experiencing homelessness faced using an illustration he calls the needs ladder the needs ladder is just a way of visualizing if somebody starts from the bottom if they are just basic needs food shelter clothing basic needs are the bottom of the needs ladder the top of the needs ladder are things like permanent housing living wage income so that you can get to stable ground the gap between basic needs in that top level it's actually like 19 rungs on the ladder and we have this idea in our community that well all you got to do is give somebody some food get them a job and then they're gonna be stable and that's not the case there as emotional needs there's physical needs there's education needs there's health needs but there's also identification transportation so if you don't have an ID you can't get a job right and if you don't have your identification well then you need your Social Security card to get your identification well what if you don't have that well then you need your birth certificate to get that and who's carrying around their birth certificate with them and so you have to order all of that stuff which costs money and you have to wait for it to arrive and so even to just get a job you've got to get all this paperwork ready and then the other side is transportation how do we get to where we need to go when things are so spread out it's very difficult to without permanent transportation without your own transportation to really become stabilized and survive in our community climbing the needs ladder is like negotiating a homeless obstacle course the illustrates why getting out of homelessness and back to stability is so difficult and why preventing individuals and families from falling into the river of homelessness in the first place should be one of our highest priorities as time we focused on upstream prevention rather than downstream rescue several years ago when I served as executive director of feed Spokane - food rescue ministry I commissioned a survey in partnership with a Regional Food Bank to discover barriers to accessing food a full third of the more than 500 people surveyed cited transportation as a significant barrier and that's why these are gold in the homeless services community this is a $4 Sta all day bus pass but to someone experiencing homelessness is more than that it's transportation it's freedom it's the ability to get out and access services it's a tool for getting your life back and that's what makes it like gold so transportation is a huge issue amongst our families especially when you think about families trying to get jobs they're looking at being employed at non-traditional employment settings where the hours are not 9:00 to 5:00 they're not you know 9:00 to 7:00 and so you have families engaging in the Spokane Transit Authority bus routes and trying to have those match those employment options that were looking at they need to get to so many different appointments I know a girl recently I took her on to get her documentation that she needs in order to get into a housing program she first you needed her eye her birth certificate for her children so I had my car I had her in the car and her two babies in the back seat I drove her to the spoken Health Department she goes in as I sit in the car I'm watching her infants she goes in purchases purchases their birth certificates now we're going to this little security office because that's the next document that she needs to in order to get into this housing program so we go to the Social Security office I sit in the parking lot with her two babies because you don't want to take children into a Social Security office she's in there for an hour and a half comes back out and says oh gosh I need more documentation now now I need to go to their doctor and get their health records I say okay jump back in we're gonna get this done today so I Drive her from the Social Security office down to the Chad's clinic that's on Perry in Perry district she goes in as I sit in the car with her infants again she's in there for about 30 minutes she comes out with the health records and she says well the lady said that this would be enough but for some reason the doctor didn't sign the paper for that the health records so I need to go and get my doctor to sign it I say oh my gosh so where's that she says it's all the way up north of the other chad's clinic on market so I take her all the way up to the Chad clinic that's in market area can you please sign this piece of paper for me I need to get my my children social security cards and the doctor says okay I'll sign it for you so she signs it she jumps back in the car we go from market all the way back down to Social Security and again I sit in the parking lot her babies are with me she's in Social Security for another hour and a half and finally she comes back out she's ordered the social security cards and we're done but we started and we didn't get done until 3 p.m. and can you just just imagine if it was just her doing that by herself with a three month old and a 12 month old and no transportation there roughly two hundred and fifty three million cars and trucks on the road in America today scattered among a hundred and fifteen million households that's roughly two cars or trucks per household how many do you and your family have now imagine not having any not one how would you get around how would you go to the grocery store to church to school how would you get your kids to school what about that important doctor appointment to get to work or to look for work in a society built around the personal automobile life changes profoundly when you don't have a vehicle to drive yourself where you need to go welcome to just one of the practical obstacles faced by families experiencing homelessness in our community today and now you know why those all day bus passes are like gold in the homeless community in late 2019 Spokane Transit Authority debated the need for low income or reduced fare bus passes without coming to a decision perhaps that the policymakers debating the need didn't have their own cars and we're forced to walk everywhere they need to go there'd be less debating and more practical action if one bedroom comes available in Spokane its picked up in seconds and seconds the list is so long for those one-bedroom units like I said it's gonna take three four years sometimes for folks to even get into a unit Spokane County is in the throes of a housing crisis that's creating a new homeless crisis among the families of the hidden homeless several significant causes of homelessness are related to this housing crisis the first is the unavailability of rentals even for people with money and a good rental history you can't just say go and find a cheaper place because there aren't any housing right now for families is very hard low-income housing is very very hard especially 1-bedroom units right now the vacancy rate for one-bedroom units is like at a point 3 if I'm not mistaking so it's super super hard for folks to find one-bedroom units so we do have a lot of folks who are just kind of milling around and waiting for available units because we can't find any one bedroom units we've got folks who have rapid rehousing through our agency or another agency or they have hen housing or they have section 8 housing or other housing options and they have their golden ticket to housing but we can't get them into any housing because we can't find a one-bedroom so the availability of rental housing in Spokane County is extremely limited for everyone but especially for low-income families the vacancy rate in Spokane is basically zero it's at functional zero which means that it's less than one percent the second cause of homelessness directly related to the current housing crisis is rent increases over the past seven years rents in the Spokane area have increased 50 percent one of the things that we're seeing the most of now are rent increases and rent increases to a tenant if the if the rent increase is higher than 10% 15% a rent increase of that map amount can be the same as getting a notice to move or an eviction notice I often say a rent increase in an eviction notice are there's very little difference just last week I talked with an individual who Lou called because his mother was paying $800 a month rent and she just got a notice this week that the rent will be going up to $1,200 that's that's extremely high that's a 50% increase but it's not unusual my income along with the rent the rent is taking 70 percent of my income basically and that's that's unheard of and it wasn't like that a few years ago I basically was living in a place that I rented an apartment for around seven years and I was a really good renter I you know I paid when I needed to it was never late paying and come to find out later that I would be you know get a 20 you know a 20 day notice to leave 20 days is not a lot of time to find a new place to run it considering everywhere is raising the rent so high when my rent was like 650 and now everywhere nowadays wants seven eight hundred nine hundred dollars up to a thousand dollars for a two-bedroom apartment people like me with a disadvantage of having low income they might be forced to move out of Spokane when we've had been here forever and I find that very sad what happened to me I didn't find a lot of resources and it was really too close to call to being being homeless according to the Washington State Department of Commerce national research shows the connection between rent increases and homelessness a $100 increase in rents is associated with an increase in homelessness between six and thirty two percent simply put there's an identifiable relationship between rising rental rates and rising homelessness to expect rental rates to dramatically rise while expecting rates of homelessness to dramatically fall is a fool's errand and this brings us to the third housing crisis related cause of homelessness a bad rental or personal history including things like bad credit or having an eviction or a felony on your record struggles that I see for families that are trying to get into housing that would be if you have an eviction on your record you're gonna work hunter types more to get into permanent housing if you have a felony on your record that's a huge barrier as well if you have any type of landlord debt you're going to have a hard time finding housing so even even though there's not much available out there to a someone who doesn't have those issues that they're up against just think about the people who have the felonies the evictions the landlord debt it's it's even harder for them to find someone willing to rent to them according to the Washington low-income housing Alliance the rising rents and evictions are the two leading causes of homelessness right now in the state of Washington we see that exact trend here in Spokane and when tenants many tenants don't even wait to get evicted because we have no cause notices to vacate and they know they can't defend themselves so they'll just move I call those self evictions because they just know they don't want to get an innovation initiated that would sail their record so they move whether they have somewhere to go to or not there's obviously a limited amount of resources and housing to put homeless families in we're building quite a bit of new homeless family housing the reality is in our Spokane community we have about 50,000 people living at or below the federal poverty line it means there's 50,000 people who are one broken down car one unexpected medical bill one lost shift at work away from becoming homeless and going into that spiral the majority of people who are homeless in our community are not homeless because of addiction or mental health they're homeless because of the housing crisis in our community they're homeless because they're getting squeezed out of affordable housing and they simply have nowhere else to go so Spokane Housing Authority really believes that housing is the foundation that you have to have in order to work through any other issues that are going on without that foundation you're stuck you have to have that foundation in order to move forward that's crucial it's critical it has to happen we need to make housing available to people in order to help them deal with anything else that's going on in their world so in my opinion with landlords being able to evict with no cause I think that hurts the tenants rights and it gives the landlord's basically power and to build anything they want to do and what does that leave the tenants with nothing you know it it totally takes advantage of tenants I think the best way that we can prevent homelessness is to protect people in the homes that they're living in already it makes no sense that when we have a homelessness situation like we do in Spokane that we make it so easy for a tenant to lose their home no reason no pause twenty days it seems to me we should be able to fix that [Music] families experiencing homelessness are those living on the bubble of homelessness need all the same things you and your family need but they're often unable to simply go shopping for basic things like toiletries toilet paper diapers back-to-school supplies and even clothes like shoes Mission Community Outreach Center who works to fill that gap by providing clothes household items toiletry and personal hygiene products free of charge low-income families and individuals their infant bank provides diapers wives and other infant supplies today we're joining them at Stephens Elementary School for their signature annual event the 9th annual kids free shoe giveaway before this day is over mission community outreach will give away a thousand 640 pairs of brand-new shoes and socks how big is the need for this free shoe giveaway sometimes a picture tells the story better than anything we could put into words our videography team bought this drone footage it's one hour into the event and the line of families waiting their turn stretches out the door and down the block how big is this need for struggling families it's huge I'm Aly Norris and I'm the executive director of Mission Community Outreach Center and today is our ninth annual school shoes for kids giveaway and at this event we give brand-new shoes and socks to kids kindergarten through eighth grade right before they head back to school and we expect probably between 15 and 17 hundred kids to come through today and this is the first year we've done it at Stevens elementary school so we're really excited about larger facilities face that we can use but we need about 250 volunteers to run this event all day and we're here from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. this year a lot of the families that will serve today or hard-working families that just need a little bit of help to make ends meet right before they go back to school we have probably 1,850 shoes in the room right now last night we had to go shopping again to try to fill in some sizes all the shoes and socks for this event are brand new right out of the box and so the kids get brand new shoes before they head back to school which is really exciting and we're lucky to be able to provide this service for the community along with the new shoes we give them a brand new pair of socks so they have to come in through the sock room first get take off their old shoes get a brand new pair of socks to try on their brain issues and every kid that comes is fitted for new shoes which is why the process takes a while which is why we're here all day so each kid is fitted to make sure that the shoes fit properly before we send them home two pairs of shoes two pairs of thoughts and a backpack two backpacks and some food this day was very important to school very it helps out a lot with money rides with the shoes and the backpacks because they are kind of expensive thank you very very very much we appreciate it there's nothing better than to pursue them children and giving them ready for school and they're so faithful it's a wonderful it's a wonderful place a family of seven remarkable and a child being we find the right pair I think for one thing just just to turn out of the hundreds thousands right now in line so eighty to get into the school is a testimony to the well especially recently immigrated refugee families you in the opening segment of this documentary we looked at the river of homelessness that flows through our community including the more than eight hundred school students plus their families experiencing homelessness in the Spokane Valley consider this question if you and your family were suddenly homeless or living on the bubble and trying to avoid being homeless would you know where to go to get help where could you go to get a free health check-up or school close to the kids what about food help a free meal or to talk with a housing specialist or to talk with a judge about a warrant or other court issue and why are we talking about this at the Spokane Valley library because the answer to these questions was created by a librarian my name is eileen Lippert and I'm the managing librarian here at the Spokane Valley library I'm also the chair for the Spokane Valley connect we started the Spokane Valley connect because we saw a need among struggling families we modeled the Spokane Valley connect after the very successful Spokane Homeless Connect that takes place every year in January but is 10 miles away in the city of Spokane the January connect is oriented towards people experiencing chronic street homelessness while it does happen finding people camping in parks or on street corners is not common in Spokane Valley but there are hundreds of families struggling and living on the bubble of homelessness they're living with friends and family or couchsurfing the Spokane Valley Connect focuses on serving the more than 800 school students and their families who may be on the brink of homelessness by providing them with resources they need to get back on their feet and find stability the Spokane Valley connect is organized by a subcommittee of the greater Valley support network who understand the need and want to make a difference by serving opportunity Presbyterian Church is a great Community Partner and donates the use of their facility I'm Kevin Lane I'm the lead pastor here at opportunity Presbyterian Church and we're thrilled to host the Valley connect and connect with so many people in our community the groups that have become a part of our church have become so because we've met them outside the church walls somewhere it's just a matter of getting out and and getting to know people and joining in a lot of the great work gots already doing out in our community because God said at work who much beyond the church walls this year we began meeting in May for the event in September we scheduled the Valley connect to catch students and families at the beginning of the school year so we can offer practical things like sports physicals backpacks and back-to-school haircuts this year we were thrilled to have 63 service providers on site which meant anyone coming to the Spokane Valley Connect could get just about anything they needed in one place they could get medical or dental help from professional health care workers people could get help restoring a stolen ID they could talk to housing specialists addiction and recovery specialists and legal services families spoke to mckinney-vento liaisons for their child's school district and they could find out how to sign their little ones up for free preschool they could even get a free library card they received clothes at the clothing bank food at the food bank and a hot meal on-site in fact our guests reported later that clothing and food were the top reasons they came Tom Cal Coblentz Spokane Valley partner CEO we we serve about forty thousand people a year in individuals and so the food alone is probably fifteen hundred families every month that's receiving some kind of food assistance whether it's full groceries or their children in there in the schools we're feeding about five hundred children in the schools on weekends plus we have a summer program to help those that are really unattached accompanied young teens homeless so it's it's hidden from a lot of the valley residents and they don't really understand the extent of poverty and homelessness here in our community unless you're working in it it's it's not really identifiable sometimes because people don't have the resources that they need and here in the valley we have homeless families that are couchsurfing and are doubled and don't have what they need so they come to a place like this and hopefully they get enough to help get them through the day or the week or whatever it is I'm a social worker and my main focus is working with students and families who are mckinney-vento eligible which is a federal law around homelessness support homeless families not 819 students were identified as living an unstable or transitional housing situation they're not out there for you to see these families are doubled up they're living with friends relatives and what we do is like I said keeping his stable in school that can mean transportation so in this area if a student lives in Spokane Public Schools but has has been attending in Central Valley we provide that transportation to and from school we can help with class fees like at the high school level they might have different class fees testing fees to get into college doing their AP exams their SATs all those have fees attached to them and we make sure that we can pay those fees every student who is identified as mckinney-vento gets free meals at school so conceivably they'll have free breakfast and lunch during the school during the school week just anything do to make sure that they have every opportunity to succeed this fall we're excited to see today finally come together there's been a lot of hard work but a lot of people to bring together 64 vendors we're about halfway through the day and we've seen about 200 people so far the services that we hope to be used well are they're down getting warrants quashed haircuts they're good taking showers they're reaching out to health agencies we've had several requests for clothes actually a lot of clothing bank people at come through today my name is Jessica drew and I came on the bus today from the house of charity to get help with clothes and possibly a bus tickets we took a shower on the mobile shower and that was nice and they got we got new underwear socks bras and we were able to go inside and get clothing in jackets and shoes and then we also had dinner we also got some food for the dog we've been a lot of nice people been a fantastic date like I'm smiling and one of the guys noticed that that was in the bus so it's nice to see the big smile because we don't necessarily get that kind of stuff every day the Spokane Valley Connect is an opportunity for us as a community to demonstrate our generosity and our fearless compassion towards struggling families in Spokane Valley this year we helped three hundred and fifty one of them it is how we become a part of the solution to homelessness in the greater Spokane area it's midwatch and I want them to know that that what they're doing for everybody is a huge thing and even if it's a shower or an outfit or even a pair of shoes it can make a huge difference it has especially in my life today well I just saw a gentleman that I see in the library every day reading we just got a haircut and a meal that made today worth it [Music] sorry the shelter will close from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. okay we will do sign-ins in the morning for the night stay clear Richland began filming this documentary as the family promise open doors emergency family shelter during a moment of uncertainty in high anxiety in the homeless services community we didn't plan it that way but we found ourselves in the middle of a very emotional moment the city of Spokane had recently announced grant funding awards for emergency shelters like Family Promise those grants were dramatically less than either what was requested or what had been awarded the previous year as a result staff were being laid off in more than half of the families in the shelter on the Friday evening we were filming would not be there by Monday families already experiencing the trauma of homelessness and life in the shelter discovered on Friday that they would need to make other arrangements by Monday in other words many of these moms and dads and kiddos would soon be sleeping in their cars again while we began filming this documentary at a challenging moment for family promise and open doors thankfully that wasn't the whole story for the past several months while we've been filming family promise has been remodeling the old casinos restaurant can market at Napa and Mission transforming it into their new and expanded headquarters and family shelters it's a huge step up going from a 2,600 square foot facility to a 6,000 square foot facility with lots of room for expansion and more services for struggling families and today it's moving so this is a lot more space than we had before and it really amplifies what we're able to do in this space most of its open space though as you'll see over here this is a area where couches and chairs will be set up and then at night this will convert to a night shelter so mats will get pulled out mats on the floor we do mats on the floor because we have little ones under the age of three and so there are fall risk groups they're up on a bed so we do mess on the floor here my favorite thing of this whole space is this this kitchenette area over here so three different times in our old space I've walked in the kitchen and seen a mom just crying and I you know asked her what what's going on why are you crying and she said I'm fine that's just we've been living in the car for the past two weeks and I can't I've not been able to make food for my own family so the first time I make food for my own family and so when we moved into this space we wanted to build a space where families could cook food for themselves have that importance of that we have three stations for this is set up like you would find similarly there like you would find in an apartment kitchen but we can also do cooking classes out of this space so we're really excited about that we also have brand-new washer and dryer facility down the way and a meeting space classroom space which we never had in our other facilities so all of these things are super exciting for us we open this documentary with Julie Garcia describing the personal ache of working with families experiencing homelessness but homelessness is an ache in the heart of our community that affects us all we ate for the eight-year-old living in a homeless shelter we're worried about his mom because he loves her we ate for homeless school students without a home with their own to go to or a bed of their own to sleep in we ate for the family unjustly evicted for no cause or forced out of their home and into a cycle of homelessness by dramatically rising rents or the family with young children waiting in line for a pair of new shoes to begin the new school year they and many more embody the hidden homeless of our community the collective ache we feel challenges each of us to do better to get involved and maybe to become a significant leader in our community one of the themes of this documentary series is what it means to be a significant leader who works for the shelana the well-being of others I call these significant leaders salom makers in the course of this documentary we've met a number of these salom makers but there's one salom maker we haven't heard from yet this person has spent the past three years pioneering data-driven solutions for families and students experiencing homelessness the solutions that appear to be working I'm Ryan Ulrich I'm the executive director of priority Spokane so three years ago priority Spokane identified student and family homelessness as a major issue for Spokane County we partnered with a local university who researched best practices and looked at what else had worked around the country and ultimately we came up with a plan it placed community health workers directly in some of our highest need elementary schools to work directly with families to help them find housing they were also given a flexible pool of funding to use to meet the needs of families and from that we ultimately were able to house seven or 80% of the students in those schools who were facing homelessness when we looked at how best to reach families that were struggling we realized that so often it was teachers and school lunch ladies and school secretaries and principals that were identifying children that were coming to school with the same clothes multiple days without lunches realizing that they were those best identifying families either that had already become homeless or facing homelessness so by placing our community health workers directly in the school those staff were able to connect those directly to that person and reach them the fastest so our universities partners looked at best practices they looked at data for our region we had foundations that are members step up and from this project a local hospital a local foundation our Health District all of those pieces came together to make this work we feel this is a model that can be used in other communities that placement of a community health worker that's specially trained directly in schools giving them a pool of funding that they can use when other resources are not available was the recipe for success and also just that collaboration how you have these different pieces these different players are working together to support this project when we looked at homelessness in our region and looked at where to start we realized that we absolutely need to better prioritize families we realize that so often services were going and resources were going to individuals facing chronic homelessness adults and those folks need help too but recognizing that if we could swim farther upstream and stabilize a child facing homelessness we prevent them from becoming a homeless youth who becomes a homeless adult so that prioritization process was especially important for this pilot project and being able to swim as far upstream as we could to address root causes so of the families that we were able to house and stabilize after three years ninety-five percent of those families remained house and stable and no longer in need of our services or help so that was really exciting for us in our journey alongside families experiencing homelessness here Family Promise we've interviewed numerous staff and families about their journeys through holmes's and most of those people faces and stories don't even appear in this documentary mainly due to time constraints but they've taught us some important lessons in the way they've taught us that the face and the story of homelessness it isn't always the one we might expect like the grandmother from Mississippi homeless with her granddaughter because being homeless was better than what they left they've taught us that there isn't a single cause for family homelessness only two common denominators a loss of community or relationship that's left them abandoned and alone with no one to turn to in deep personal trauma that's left them wounded involving and at the end of the day families experiencing homelessness here at Family Promise or at st. Margaret's shelter or The Salvation Army are asking you and me two basic questions are you going to be the next group to abandon me but when you help me find community and are you going to add to my trauma are you willing to help me heal they need our help and our fearless compassion they can't do it by themselves if they could they wouldn't be in a homeless shelter [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]
