Agency Mission

To assist homeless women, children, and families obtain stable housing through temporary shelter and services.

Agency Vision

Pajaro Valley Shelter Services aspires to be a national model program that helps women, children, and families end the causes and cycles of homelessness—one family at a time. By lifting their dignity, identifying their barriers and helping to set their goals, homeless families will develop the skills and attitudes necessary to move on to stable housing and improved personal and economic self-sufficiency.

About Homelessness

Families are homeless because there isn’t enough affordable housing.  It is like a game of musical chairs.  People with the most – and highest – barriers will have the hardest time competing for the scarce chairs when the music stops.  Barriers range from poverty to drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, lack of job skills, physical disabilities and much more.   

Our role is to help families discover that they can make changes in their own lives and to help them develop strategies for making those changes.  The kinds of changes which will, among other things, allow them to compete successfully for the limited number of “chairs”.  This is what we mean by “Ending Homelessness – One Family at a Time”.

Our overall goal is to help people elevate themselves above the circumstances that led to their being homeless.  We do this first by providing shelter and then connecting families to the other services they need like counseling, job training, public assistance, ESL classes, or immigration assistance.  We meet with them often to ensure that the services they’re receiving are working well for them and being used well by them.

Most people come to us looking only for housing.   We carefully explain that our programs are NOT about cheap housing but are designed to help them make meaningful changes in their lives.  We try to be clear about the fact that the ongoing requirements can seem intrusive but are critical to our ability to help them help themselves. 

Most families begin by saying they want what we offer.   In truth, many families are resistant to the kinds of changes they need to make to stabilize their lives.  The successful ones get past this resistance but some never do and occasionally we have to ask a family to leave the Program. 

The program is HARD!  With their permission, we get right into their lives to help them identify and break old habits – and to make new ones – healthy ones.

The Emergency Shelter for Women and Children:

The primary criterion for admittance to the Shelter is need.  We carefully explain the program requirements and house rules and try to determine whether they’re likely to be able to live within the constrained situation in the Shelter. 

Once in the Shelter, clients have 90 days to identify the circumstances that led to their homelessness and to figure out what needs to change so they can move to stable housing when they leave.   This isn’t much time, so it must be used wisely.  The highly-structured environment in the Shelter is difficult for some but necessary to accommodate so many people in so little space.  Additionally, since it is dormitory-style living, we generally don't allow males in the Shelter over the age of 12 years.

About the Transitional Housing Program:

The challenge in the Transitional Housing Program is picking the families that both need the program and have a reasonable chance of being able to make the major changes in their lives that will enable them to build a stable economic future.  Choosing the right families is definitely an art, not a science! Again, it’s a credit to the hard, collaborative work of the staff that so few families must be asked to leave. The Transitional Housing Program provides more time to make significant life changes but this also means that we’re involved in their lives for a much longer period of time than in the Shelter.

Families in both programs face common obstacles to success:

• Some think the world has to change for their lives to work
• Many lack parenting skills
• Many are resistant to change
• Many are resistant to structure
• Past traumas – like child abuse, substance abuse, and domestic violence – can limit people’s ability to respond to pressures in constructive ways.
• Nearly every immigrant family has at least some members who don’t have legal documents.  Too often this is the mother.

It’s a constant balancing act to meet both the needs of individual families and those of the other families in the programs.  There is definitely no One-Size-Fits-All answer, just hard work, patience, and careful teamwork to help parents fulfill their self-sufficiency plans and build secure futures for their children.  With a limited size staff, it takes good people, good people skills, and lots of work to make this program happen: