Family falls through safety net
A family in crisis tested Spokane’s social services safety net over the weekend and found it lacking.
A mother, daughter and the daughter’s three small children were cast out into the street by an angry acquaintance with whom they had been living. They needed shelter, and it would be two days before they could move into their own apartment in which they had invested all their scant resources on security deposit and first month’s rent.
In the two years since being forced from their east Spokane apartment by a fire, the family has moved from one residence to another, always depending on the kindness, or at least the acquiescence, of others and never able to save enough to find a place of their own.
“We’ve always worked something out,” said Marcel Smith, 40. “We’ve always had a place to go.”
That is until Saturday, when Smith, her daughter Jessica Landberg, 22, and Landberg’s daughters, Heidi, 5, Alana, 2, and Kylie, 7 months – a family living on the edge of poverty’s abyss – fell in.
Whatever men were once in their lives are now totally out of the picture, said Smith, who lives on state disability payments, and Landberg, who receives Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
From a Laundromat, Smith called the city’s only two emergency shelters open to families. The Union Gospel Mission Crisis Shelter for Women and Children, which can accommodate 13 mothers with children, was full. The Salvation Army Family Emergency Center, with 18 rooms, was full as well, and has a waiting list.
Smith called several other crisis centers, but each had either a waiting list or an interview process that took days to complete. She called 211, the year-old social services assistance line, but it is only in operation Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. She called 911 and was told “we can’t help you.”
The family finally found the help it needed from Off-Broadway Family Outreach, a street ministry in the West Central Neighborhood. Outreach volunteer Jan Foland answered the call and put the desperate family up for the weekend in a Division Street hotel at her own expense.
Foland has devoted herself to helping feed Spokane’s hungry and house its homeless since retiring as a teacher in the Spokane School District. She said stories like Smith and Landberg’s are all too common.
“It’s not going to get any better,” Foland said, pointing to an impending national recession. “It’s just going to grow. Gasoline is driving up food and the cost of everything. Many more people are going to fall into that hole who don’t have the resources to climb out.”
She said many of the needy her ministry serves already have to choose between food and heat. “The shelters are full. The room at the inn is gone.”
On Monday, Off Broadway Family Outreach pastor Larry Whiston, a convicted felon and graduate of the Union Gospel Mission program, helped the family move into its new home. A local businessman donated the $80 Smith and Landberg needed to get their household items out of storage.
Today, for the first time in two years, the family has a place of its own. Landberg intends to study for her general equivalency diploma and a chance to break the cycle of poverty that has currently enveloped three generations of her family.
“This family is going to make it,” Whiston said, promising his ministry would watch over them. “They want out of this life, this homelessness.”