Dear Friend,
The last woman staying at Haven Housing @ Ascension Place moved home this week! It’s a bittersweet celebration because after 42 years of providing a stepping stone for women and non-binary people, the Ascension Place sober transitional housing program is closing.
With your dedicated support, we’ve achieved our mission at Ascension Place: We provided thousands of women in crisis and transition housing and the opportunity to explore options for their futures. After intensive planning with participants, staff, and our advisors, we realized that Haven Housing cannot be the go-to place for women in every kind of crisis. We are good at solving one type of crisis: homelessness.
Over the last 40 years, homelessness has gotten more complicated. The opioid crisis. Increases in gun violence. Increases in rates of mental illness. Corporations intentionally paying low wages. Global pandemics. All this, on top of generations of racial and gendered trauma. Haven Housing can’t be experts in all of it—we can’t be everything for everyone.
We CAN help a family experiencing homelessness, however. We can provide them a safe haven and work with partners to address their health, financial, social, and nutrition needs. When we do this really well, we can prevent future episodes of homelessness. The first time I was homeless with my kids, I stayed at Haven Housing @ St. Anne’s Place. That was also the last time I didn’t have a home of my own. My family is just one Haven Housing success story and I am proud of that—proud of us.
Once you’re through the immediate crisis of homelessness, women, non-binary people, and their children want different types of support to stay stably housed. Because Haven Housing can’t be everything to everyone, we have also sunset our Next Step Housing program that provided supportive services to people in their own homes. We are thrilled that every participant in that program chose to transfer to our partners at Start Today Hennepin to receive a higher level of personalized support than Haven Housing has been able to provide.
We know that highly individualized support works best to help people move home, and it is what we will continue offering at Haven Housing @ St. Anne’s Place emergency family shelter for as long as we can. St. Anne’s Place has been completely full, with 16 families each night, for the last year-plus. At the same time, family homelessness in Hennepin County more than doubled. We need your donation today to help families move home. We can’t do this work alone. Over the next several months, we look forward to sharing news about future partnerships that will strengthen the homelessness-ending services at St. Anne’s Place for years to come.
