Winter Sanctuary Collaborative
THE CHURCH WORKING AS ONE
Winter Sanctuary 2016-17
Welcome to the very first Winter Sanctuary Collaborative Newsletter! There is lots of excitement over launching the 2016-17 season. We are grateful for every church member and volunteer of the Winter Sanctuary Collaborative Team. The amount of service and unconditional love unleashed into the Sacramento community by all of you has been amazing.
As most of you know, several organizations partnered together this year to form a collaboration around the Winter Sanctuary program. The collaboration consists of, First Steps Communities & FSC Pilgrimage Program, E49 Corp, and Sacramento Self Help Housing (along with several service partners as well). Each organization is working together in order to provide a fantastic opportunity for houses of worship and faith to participate in Sanctuary program the same as in years past, but also to save costs, increase capacity and begin to further meet and resource the needs for our guests and community.
We want to keep an open line of communication so please feel free to contact a WSC member with questions, concerns, or feed back.
Steve Watters
Program Director
swatters@firststepcommunities.org
Ken Bennett
Intake Supervisor
Nicolette Romig
Church Resource Coordinator
New Partnership with the Sacramento Food Bank
A big addition to the Winter Sanctuary Program this year is a new partnership with the Sacramento Food Bank. Some of you may already partner with Sacramento Food Bank, but for those of you who have not, we have established a partnership that will let every church in the program participate if they wish. This should have a big impact on your cost to prepare meals for your guests.
Church coordinators will be sent an email explaining details and process for volunteers to follow if they decide to receive food from the bank. We will try to lead this effort to make it easy as possible for all who are involved.
The leadership at the Sacramento Food Bank, Rosie Cerna and Patrick Becknell have been very supportive of working with us all and we are certain that with their guidance we can make this a great addition to the Winter Sanctuary this year.
A note from Steve Watters
This season the Winter Sanctuary Collaborative we will be expanding the scope of the program to serve clients in an expanded area of Sacramento County, and increase the total number of guests served without adding additional guests to any single overnight.
First, to expand coverage in Sacramento County we have included three additional shelter programs in the Winter Sanctuary Program including First Step Communities PilgrimageSac church shelter program in Midtown Sacramento, and HART shelter programs in Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova. The PilgrimageSac program serves up to 200 dinners and approximately 110 overnight guests each night they operate, another 3,500 shelter-bed nights. The Hart shelter programs in Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova will add another 7 weeks or 2,500 additional shelter-bed nights. These efforts will raise the forecasted total WSP shelter-bed nights from 13,200 to over 19,000 and it will be a first step in serving adults experiencing homelessness across the county.
The second step is to increase the pickup points to three pick-up sites instead of one. That means we will pick-up from multiple parts of the county not just the downtown location. I believe this will not only help us serve more guests but provide a more in-depth understanding to our elected officials and policy makers of the overall county-wide growing numbers of individuals experiencing homelessness and in need of these services.
A note from Tammy Vallejo
E49's role in this (WSC) partnership is to provide some easy ways for the churches to engage in a service opportunity for the homeless in Sacramento County. But our plan is not to stop there! Once churches are engaged, they have a great opportunity to be the hands and feet of Jesus. With E49, churches will have a partner who will continue to resource them into year-round opportunities to make a difference! One example is our Housing & Hope(TM) model.
Housing & Hope(TM) is a collaborative approach offering housing and mentorship to those in need, and does this together with other organizations who are “on mission” together with us. For more information on Housing & Hope(TM) or Winter Sanctuary, please contact us at info@e49corp.org.
A note from Ken Bennett
We hope one day that the Sacramento Winter Sanctuary will become obsolete. However until then Sacramento Self Help Housing, a member of the new Winter Sanctuary Collaborative, is planning on chipping away at the number of homeless that will be back next year by assisting as many as possible to find housing this year.
SSHH will be providing the intake services for Winter Sanctuary. During the intake process we will be screening for individuals that can be housed in the present system of the Continuum of Care and we will be looking for people with income that we can assist in their own housing search.
For those without adequate income or skills to rent we will be providing them access to the housing provided by Sacramento Steps Forward by administering the VI-SDPAT, which is the vulnerability index questionnaire. Depending on how the individual scores they are placed in the que developed by the Coordinated Entry System. They might be able to access Permanent Supportive Housing or Rapid-Rehousing depending on the appropriateness of their situation.
Alas, at this time they cannot all be housed but we will work to house as many as possible, especially the most vulnerable. Therefore by the efforts of the participating Churches they are not only providing temporary shelter but assisting with the possibility of helping some become permanently housed.