Compass Housing Alliance - Peter Kurtz-Glovas

Peter Kurtz-Glovas - Interview Transcript

So between our day center, our client services office and hygiene center, we serve somewhere between two and 300 people a day, that varies depending on the season, depending on the weather, literally, yesterday, it was raining out, so we had fewer people coming in, they were just sheltering down in their tents, but, yeah, we see a lot of folks every day coming in here, working to get their mail, open bank accounts, access any funds that they have available through jobs or through social security, get showers taken care of, do their laundry. They come in and talk to our housing navigators to help find suitable housing placements in the community. We do a community lunch at 1 PM, and we also just have our day center where folks can come in and hang out for the day, get out of the elements and really just kind of feel like they can relax for a little bit, without having to really, kind of, be subjugated to the other things that you might run into out in the public sphere.

Yeah, so, lunches, we have done everything that we can in terms of spacing folks out six feet apart in line. They get a to-go lunch and they take that out the door, and then from 1:30 until 2:10, we're closed and we do a deep clean of the space to make sure that it's gonna be clean for everybody when they come back, and then at 2:10, we reopen the doors, folks can come back in, charge their phones, go back to hanging out, all that kinda stuff.

Well, the other big thing that we know is going to impact us and we're just unsure of how or when, is the stimulus checks. We're one of, like, three facilities in the country that operates on this sort of partnership with a major bank, where we are our own self-contained bank here, and we report out to our partners at The Commerce Bank of Washington. We are preparing to probably receive a fair amount of stimulus checks for our clients, and right now, we're gearing up to help our clients as best as we can when they receive this money from the federal government, so that's gonna be, we know it's gonna impact us, we just don't know when, and were hoping to kind of guide our clients through that process as we get there.