Mary’s Place - Marty Hartman

Marty Hartman - Interview Transcript

Mary's Place believes that no one's child should sleep outside, and that everyone is someone's child, and that we work really hard to keep families together, safe, wanted and invited in. And so we offer shelter at six different locations. We have close to 700 beds every night. We'll be opening another location here shortly, in another couple weeks, for another couple hundred beds. So we are just grateful to be standing in this space and being able to try to rise-up to meet the need outside. We know it's not possible to shelter every family right now, but we are really working hard to make sure no child has to sleep outside in our county.

We're downtown in the Regrade area, in a beautiful eight-story building that Amazon has built for Mary's Place. It's eight-stories, it is eight stories of love. It's four floors of shelter spaces, and then four floors of resources for our families, including a beautiful rooftop deck and laundry, and games and tables for families to play at. So we are so excited, we moved into this building in March, right at the height of the crisis, and it was our saving grace. This building allowed us to de-intensify all of our other shelters, to move families out. And instead of returning them to homelessness, we got to bring them into a brand new building. We say this was not a coincidence, it was a miracle for us that we had a place to move those families to–in the middle of a crisis, in the middle of a pandemic. And now they have a healthy, healing place to begin again.

Shelters are lifesaving, and lifesaving tonight for that family that may have that mom with that newborn that has nowhere to go, that mom with twin boys that are just trying to graduate from high school this year, or the mom with the toddler that is learning to take its first steps, and it's an amazing gift of healing and hope every day. Healing from medical care to the grief and the pain and the trauma that you experienced on your journey into homelessness, and the hope that you will make it out, it's just a matter of time. 90% of families are one and done, this is just one crisis, this is the safety net they needed so that they could move forward in their own lives. Mary's Place placed over several hundred families into housing last year, and we are on pace to do that again this year, we know it's possible, it's just one family at a time.

We were looking so forward to 2020 as the year we reached no child sleeps outside, we were getting, inching closer and closer to our goal, we've added beds, we've added this brand new shelter, and we knew that we were getting close to making sure we didn't have to turn any family away, any night. And then COVID hit, and it really changed our trajectory, and it changed our daily lives. When COVID came the volunteers went away, school discontinued and began to be only remotely, and so that meant we had everybody in shelter every day, depending on us. And so we went to work, and our mighty staff rose to the occasion, we started taking 1,000 temperatures a day, we started trying to gather all the laptops and resources we could so that every child had access to remote learning. Our team rose up and really just went to work to make sure that all of the needs were being met here.

And then we saw the need growing outside, the domestic violence cases increasing, more families trying to leave their homes because they couldn't stay home and stay healthy. And so our outreach teams are out there, meeting with families still, trying to bring them into shelter, or keep them safe wherever it is that they are right now. So we are working hard to develop prevention resources, we know that there'll be many, many more families coming into homelessness as a result of this crisis, as a result of unemployment. And we wanna be there and make sure that we can catch them as they fall into homelessness. No child should have to sleep outside, and together our community can do this.

I think at Mary's Place this crisis has brought our community closer together. We are collaborating in ways that we never knew we could. And with the virtual connections and Zoom, and Teams, and meetings between our family service providers, and with public health getting more information out, everybody feeling more connected because we can hear it together, we can ask our questions and get them answered. And it's the same thing here at Mary's Place, bringing that virtual connection from the outside world inside. So it's an amazing connection that we've been able to build, and collaboration across the city and across this county, in ways like we had never seen before. It's challenging us greatly but it's a great new challenge that we know we can't go back from.