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The people we serve need friends who understand that they have been traumatized. We’re here to act as a bridge to services, a listening ear, and a path into permanent housing for our marginalized neighbors throughout the Monterey County area. We offer hospitality, safety, motivation, guidance toward a life of greater health and happiness, and a bridge to services they might feel are unavailable to them elsewhere–all at a pace they feel safe with.
We do this through our four programs: Dorothy’s Kitchen, SanaVida Healing Center, Streets To Homes, and House of Peace Supportive Housing. And the formula works.
With love, respect and compassion, Dorothy’s Place provides essential services and transitional support to people experiencing the injustice of homelessness and extreme poverty.
We
We are grateful.
Dorothy’s Place started as Dorothy’s Kitchen in 1982. We started by serving egg salad sandwiches from the back of a station wagon. In 2015, the organization decided it was time to do more than meet people’s basic needs, we wanted to give them the opportunity to improve their lives.
Now, we serve meals made from scratch with fresh, locally donated ingredients that are loaded with nutrition and, most importantly, respect.
Over time, Dorothy’s Place has grown in Salinas’ Chinatown neighborhood as a home for hope, a place where our mission can truly come alive.
Every day, we serve fresh, nutritious meals through Dorothy’s Kitchen. But nourishment is only the beginning.
At Dorothy’s Place we also offer SanaVida, meaning “healing life”. A welcoming space where people facing mental health challenges, substance use barriers, and the trauma of chronic homelessness can find understanding, support, and care.
Our State-certified Peer Support Specialists bring more than professional training: they bring lived experience, compassion, and deep listening. They know what it means to struggle, to survive, and to find a path forward. At SanaVida, people can connect with someone who truly understands and can help them navigate complex healthcare systems with dignity and trust.
Inside SanaVida, individuals also find access to basic needs and services that many of us take for granted, the small stabilizing supports that make healing possible.
There’s more.
Our SanaVida, Streets To Homes, and House of Peace teams include dedicated social workers who also serve as housing navigators and care coordinators. They help people manage extraordinary challenges from enrolling in benefits and healthcare coverage, to connecting with primary care, pharmacies, and wellness supports.
Because over the years, we have learned something essential:
This is not only a homelessness crisis. It is also a healthcare crisis, one where untreated disabilities and unmet behavioral health needs too often lead to the loss of stability, work, and housing.
Looking ahead, we are filled with hope.
Dorothy’s Place is preparing to build our first Permanent Supportive Housing community a village of safe, private, minimal units that can be built just across the street from Dorothy’s Place, with new construction techniques that are less costly than traditional construction.
When completed, this community will provide transitional housing for 30-35 unsheltered neighbors recovering from chronic health conditions, supporting them on their journey from crisis to stability.
We dream of bringing safety and healing to the more than 820 chronically unhoused individuals in Monterey County, and building a future where no one is left to recover alone on the streets.
Can you help us make that future possible?
We are associated with many people of many faiths and traditions. The Catholic Worker community that marked our beginning quickly became a multi-faith community and we now honor every contribution of spirit as a gift that can lift us and the people we serve out of poverty and desperation. The spirit of compassion that drives us and our partners inspires us to be more professional, more practical and more resourceful, all the time listening to our homeless neighbors for cues on how to serve them better.
We Are Inspired by Dorothy Day
In fact, our facility, Dorothy’s Place, home to three programs and our administration, is named after her. Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist turned social activist, who, along with Peter Maurin, founded the Catholic Worker Movement. She became known for her social justice campaigns in defense of the poor, forsaken, hungry and homeless. She espoused nonviolence, and hospitality for the impoverished and downtrodden. Her commitment to social justice spanned most of the twentieth century, including her support of the Russian Revolution in 1917, then turning around in 1971 and accusing the Soviets of mistreating Alexander Solzenitsin. The Catholic Worker movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper, created to stake out a neutral, pacifist position in the increasingly war-torn 1930s. This grew into a “house of hospitality” in the slums of New York City and then a series of farms for the poor to live together communally. The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States, and to Canada and the United Kingdom; more than 30 independent but affiliated CW communities had been founded by 1941. Well over 100 communities exist today, all over the world. Her autobiography The Long Loneliness was published in 1953. Day’s account of the Catholic Worker movement, Loaves and Fishes, was published in 1963. A popular movie called Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story, was produced in 1996 about the life and struggles that Day endured. The first full-length documentary about her, Dorothy Day: Don’t Call Me a Saint, premiered at Marquette University, where her papers are housed, on November 29, 2005. More information on Dorothy Day you can visit the following website: www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday
But now, there’s more. Our social workers walk into homeless encampments, meeting with consumers that are afraid to leave their belongings unattended to go to an office meeting. We coordinate their health care, provide transportation to appointments and prescription assistance. We assist in navigating a very difficult housing environment in Monterey County and employ multiple strategies to assist very disenfranchised, chronically ill adults into their own safe permanent housing.
What does the future hold? We believe that both interim and permanent supportive housing is critically needed in our community and while we are always looking for ways to assist in the development of new supportive housing, our goal primary goal is to get all of our 200 consumers into safety and better health.
Jill Allen
Executive Director
In the last thirty-four years, Jill has provided management services to the public benefit sector, specializing fund development, program management, administrative development, public relations and strategic planning.
Jill Allen
Executive Director
In the last thirty-four years, Jill has provided management services to the public benefit sector, specializing fund development, program management, administrative development, public relations and strategic planning.
Jill is currently the executive director for Franciscan Workers of Junipero Serra, better known as Dorothy’s Place (whose programs include Dorothy’s Kitchen, SanaVida Healing Center, Streets To Homes, and House of Peace Supportive Housing). She started with Dorothy’s Place in 2006 as a development consultant and began her service as executive director in 2014.
Jill is a past president of the Monterey/San Benito Counties Coalition of Homeless Services Providers and its current Governance Chair. She is also a past president and current member of the Salinas Downtown Community Board, devoted to the revitalization of Salinas’ Chinatown area.
Prior to and during her experience in the public benefit sector, she devoted twenty-one years to military service and retired from the United States Air Force in November 2015.
Serving our community’s vulnerable is one of the most thrilling and fulfilling experiences you can have. If you’re interested in working with Dorothy’s Place, please see our open positions.
Our dedicated and compassionate volunteers are the reason we are able to change lives. While we always welcome professionals from social services, health and construction. Anyone can have a rewarding volunteer experience at Dorothy’s Place. Both Dorothy’s Kitchen and SanaVida Healing Center need volunteers every day of the year.