Salinas, CA, USA – January 10, 2019 – Dorothy’s Place says farewell to Women Alive Emergency Shelter after 13 years of serving the Central Coast community.
Our overnight walk-in shelter for homeless women has served the community since December 2005. Beginning as the only walk-in, no-questions-asked women’s shelter in Monterey County, run by volunteers, it served a clear purpose. Unaccompanied women that had nowhere else to go made Women Alive Emergency Shelter their home in the evening.We soon received grant funding, employed and trained staff, and many overnight volunteers still served. We assisted hundreds of forgotten and neglected women annually, thousands over the years, with basic shelter, food, acceptance and forgiveness. We were relevant for the time. We were their only choice for safe sleep.
Over the years, we developed case management for our guests, and then a transitional living program, and many of our guests moved their lives out of homelessness. Many just moved out of Chinatown.We thank the City of Salinas, in partnership with the County of Monterey, for committing to serve these vulnerable women with an overnight shelter that operates year-around, and most women prefer it to enduring the threats to their safety in Chinatown as they walk to Women Alive each evening.
Those few women that remain at Women Alive are challenged with severe physical and mental disabilities and we recognize that we are not serving them well with our nightly shelter. These women need a 24-hour shelter staffed with health professionals, and we cannot provide that. Women Alive Emergency Shelter is no longer relevant for our time.
January 12 will be the last day of operation for Women Alive Emergency Shelter. We will, along with our many community partners, do our best to assist the very few women that remain into services that will better meet their needs.
We thank these grant makers that kept us serving our most vulnerable women for thirteen years:
United Way of Monterey County
Community Foundation for Monterey County
Women’s Fund of Monterey County
City of Salinas Emergency Solutions Grant
City of Salinas Community Development Block Grant
Monterey County Community Action Partnership
Monterey County Department of Social Services
Harden Foundation
Nancy Eccles & Homer M. Hayward Family Foundation
Federal Emergency Food and Shelter Program Local Board
Yellow Brick Road Benefit Shop
Interfaith Outreach of Carmel
The Sister Fund
We thank the nearly 500 individual donors that gave their treasure over the years to ensure that the basic needs of thousands of homeless women were met at Women Alive Emergency Shelter.We thank the hundreds of volunteers that made sharing themselves with these women their priority.
And we thank our care team, the staff and volunteers at Women Alive, who through good times and bad, performed heroically in what were most often, very difficult circumstances. They served with grace and professionalism, each with a heartfelt desire to help severely traumatized women.We, and our guests, are indebted to their service.
In 2018, Dorothy’s Place served 85,000 meals.
We assisted 1,054 homeless people with 19,937 visits in our Drop-In Center.
We assisted 135 homeless people with case management. 45 are now in their own sustainable housing.
85 homeless women slept safely for 2,981 bed nights.
149 homeless people are preparing for housing through weekly meetings, but are still waiting for one of our nine overtasked social workers to assist.
