Our Place Shelter Strives to Help its Guests 'Heal and Grow'

An Open and Inviting Environment

Located on East 2nd and 21st Street, on what was formerly known as the Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services campus, Our Place has been purposed to be an open and inviting environment for those in need of shelter.

“It's a beautiful campus with a park-like setting where it's open,” Jen Cassady, a former recovery specialist, now the Our Place director, said. “There's a lot of open spaces for our families, women and seniors to spend some time outside. [The campus] is fenced-in, so each building has its own very large backyard as well as the open community spaces.”

For Cassady and the rest of the RISE staff, creating an open-space environment is essential to ensuring that the guests staying at Our Place can find comfort and dignity.

“We felt that if we wanted to provide a therapeutic place for someone to transition from homelessness into a more permanent living situation, they needed a place to heal and grow,” Cassady said. “So rather than have a warehouse-like setting or some of the traditional models that look institutional, we decided to offer dignity and beauty [with an open-space campus].”

More Space Inside as Well for Families, Seniors, Women and Even Pets

It’s not just the open green spaces and picnic tables across the campus that are designed to make local residents sheltered at Our Place feel safe and at home, as even the interior rooms of the buildings have been designed with this purpose in mind.

“Each family has their own room and the rooms are fairly large, even our smallest room can have five people pretty comfortably inside,” Cassady said.  “No bathrooms are shared between more than three families, but most have one or two families per bathroom. Each family home has a beautiful, large kitchen space with an industrial-sized refrigerator and a large pantry.”

Three of the buildings on the campus are designed as family homes that can host up to 28 families. Another building is designated for those in the Temporary Assistance for Displaced Seniors [TADS] program, which currently hosts six seniors. A fifth building is solely for women, which although it has the capacity for about 115 women, is currently only hosting 85 women, due to ongoing COVID-19 health restrictions. 

The women’s home, which officially began operation when women were transitioned from the Washington street shelter on August 14th, has five wings, to suit various needs.

“One of the wings is a pet wing, one is for seniors and then two women and a dorm-style,” Amber Howell, Director of the Washoe County Human Services Agency, said. “The biggest challenge that we've had is because of COVID, the dorm area can only be at 50% capacity. So that's really been the only challenge we've had is we haven't been able to go to full capacity [in the dorm-style wing].” 

Due to COVID-19 and safety precautions, services which could eventually be offered to more women in the community have to be curtailed. But even women not sleeping at Our Place will soon be allowed to come to the campus and get showers.

“Hopefully in the next week we will be able to provide community showers, even for those who don't want to be in the shelter,” Howell said at the time of our interview. “So that's probably been the biggest challenge during the pandemic is the social distancing requirement. Our Place was designed to have more beds and more room than downtown Reno because we knew we needed it,” she said of women who might have been staying overnights at the Washington street location, for whom Our Place is now full.

Inspirational messages line the walls. Opening and getting everything in order has been somewhat of a mad scramble at times during the pandemic.

Challenges of Opening during a Pandemic

Cassady said RISE usually relies on a volunteer base of over 700 people, having served community meals for years among several previous initiatives, but due to COVID-19 they have not been able to go onto the Our Place campus. Still, they’ve been helping indirectly, with donations for those sleeping at the shelter, whom Cassady refers to as guests.

“One of the things that we do for our guests here is when they come in, we know that they don't have much so we have a ‘bed-in-a-bag’ for every person that walks in and we invite them to take that with them,” Cassady said. “So [guests] can come into our closet, pick out bedding, take it to their room and then take that with them when they leave. So we've got an enormous response from the community for beds, bags and cribs and things like that.” 

Additionally, in order to address the risks of COVID-19 infections for those who are on the campus, Washoe County has been providing cleaning services at Our Place.

“The safety of our guests is important, so we have cleaning schedules where we clean often,” Cassady said. “The County has paid for a professional cleaning staff to come in and we've involved our guests to be part of that community of keeping each other safe, so we ask that every time they use a shared surface that they wipe it down and sanitize it in between use and that's been a great response [from the guests].”

Flyers point people to the many resources in our area. On campus, available services include an on-site therapist and nurse.

Keeping Families Together and Pets as Companions

An additional asset for Our Place and those staying there is close proximity to Crossroads, which provides substance use and addiction counseling along with other support. With on-site daycare services for the families staying at Our Place, families can now stay together while a parent undergoes treatment at Crossroads.

“What we have found is the worst thing that can happen to a parent is to lose their children because they're without shelter,” Howell said. “So by keeping the families together, they don't have to worry about [being separated] and can just focus on what it is that they need to do. Having the daycare there allows them to have a place for their children to go during the day so they can attend groups and case management and those types of things.”

By having a wing in the women’s home designated for pets, Our Place also aims to remove what can be an additional barrier for houseless individuals seeking shelter.

“Not being able to bring your pets into shelter is a barrier to people wanting to enter because their pet is usually the only thing that they have, that's their companion, their best friend,” Howell said.

“I've met with a lot of the women there who have their pets and it has made a world of difference for them. [Having pets] also bonds the guests together, they are a morale booster and so it's been going very well. A lot of people who didn't take shelter in the past because of the fact they couldn't have their pets are now sheltered, so we know that that philosophy works and it's an incentive to come indoors instead of staying outdoors in the elements and where it's unsafe,” Howell said.

Time Limits Loosened with Long Term in Mind

The Our Place approach varies from traditional formats typically found in many shelters across the country. Most shelters operate with 90-day-stay time limits for guests, or even shorter stays, which can lead to a street-to-shelter-to-street cycle. Our Place is setting out to break that cycle with the goal of serving as a stepping stone for guests toward more permanent housing.  

“Traditionally there's been a 90-day-stay [at shelters], but when we look at our housing environment we know that 90 days is not enough,” Cassady said. “So our goal is to have people come in, take a break, rest, feel comfortable and heal [before finding permanent housing]. Obviously, we're not going to make that goal right away, but we like to say that six months is about how long we'd like you to stay. But again, if you're here and you're working hard to end your houselessness, if you're working hard to try to move on to your next steps, whatever that may be, we won't remove you.”

Many RISE staff members have lived experience with homelessness themselves, so they know how difficult this journey can be. “RISE hired 75% of our staff as peers, so they have lived experience [with homelessness] and they play a great role in advocating and walking with our guests to make sure that they have the emotional support as well as the connection to resources,” Cassady said. “We put relationships first, we listen rather than come in with a plan and tell people what they need. We've gotten great results by offering that relationship, respect and that dignity rather than coming in and offering what we think might be right. [This approach] builds long-term success.”

“[RISE] knows this population, they know all of the guests and their personal stories,” Howell said. The decision to award the Our Place contract to RISE surprised some initially, as it had been more of a grassroots organization at its inception.

“That connection is so vital for us to have a vendor that the guests trust, and I trust RISE completely,” Howell said. “We understand our roles, so we complement each other instead of contradicting each other, so it's been great. They've never done something of this magnitude and they've done it in a wonderful way and I'm really proud of them coming together, giving us a proposal and implementing what they promised. It’s been a great process. I love their passion and I love their commitment to helping us by being a critical partner in this community.”

Although Our Place has been launched and is working to overcome the challenges brought on by the pandemic, resolving the affordable housing crisis and helping the hundreds of people living on the streets in our area is far from over.

“Our Place has solved a couple of challenges that we're facing, but it certainly doesn't solve people experiencing homelessness because there's other variables,” Howell said. “Our Place gets rid of some additional barriers by increasing bed capacity, access to daycare and the ability to have pets. So we’re one step closer to really having a targeted approach and a menu of services, but it’s in no way going to solve all of the issues. We still have to move on to the next set of issues and start tackling those, but it's nice to be able to check a few off a few boxes for those that weren't sheltered or didn't want to get sheltered for those reasons. So [Our Place] is a great first step.”

Cassady agrees that the long-term goal of ending houselessness in our community may still be a long way off. However, she is optimistic that Our Place will continue playing a positive role for its guests moving forward.

“So our long-term goal is to always have [Our Place] empty, right?” Cassady said. “We're going to make sure that everybody has a safe and stable place to live with a locking door, a roof and their dignity intact. But in the meantime as we move toward that, the goals are to continue that mission of a healing and therapeutic environment where people are respected and listened to and honored. When they come into Our Place, they're surrounded by support and we can get creative in finding long-term solutions for people, with people.”

Reporting and Photography by Scott King for Our Town Reno