Women’s homeless shelter in Knox Presbyterian Church the final piece of Spokane’s new ‘scatter-site’ model

The eighth city-funded homeless shelter opened last week as part of Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown’s pivot to smaller shelters dispersed throughout the city – the last of the new “scatter-site” model to debut for the time being.

Operating out of the Knox Presbyterian Church gymnasium in the Emerson/Garfield neighborhood, the women-only shelter can host as many as 30 people at a time and will only be open to guests at night. Women’s shelters are an important part of the shelter system, said Julie Garcia, of Jewels Helping Hands, which will operate the Knox shelter.

“Most women out on the street have some intersection between domestic violence and safety,” Garcia said. “Providing a safe space for women only, so that they feel comfortable, it doesn’t trigger that trauma if we have a space specifically for them.”

Stays are arranged primarily by referrals, and guests are given bus passes or transportation in the morning in order to prevent queues in the neighborhood before and after the shelter is operating.

“This is a lesson we learned, that you can’t just ask everybody to exit and not expect them to be in the neighborhood where the shelter is,” Garcia said.

For many homeless women in the community, the Hope House women’s shelter had long been the preferred location. But after years of serving as a refuge for women, many of whom were fleeing domestic violence or dangerous situations on the streets, Hope House is transitioning into a medical respite facility that serves homeless people exiting hospitals who need continued non-emergency care.

That means the city will be losing around 80 beds dedicated to homeless women.

“They’re working very hard to transition most of those women into some kind of permanent housing or better situation … but whatever folks are still there, those are going to be the folks we’re prioritizing,” Garcia said.

Garcia noted that Jewels Helping Hands plans to attend the upcoming neighborhood council meeting to talk through questions about the shelter, and to engage with residents during weekly cleanups of the neighborhood.

The Knox shelter is the eighth funded through the city’s scatter-site pilot program, a major shift from the single central shelter on Trent Avenue that had housed as many as 500 people at a time during extreme weather events and around 250 towards the end of its use by the city. With the addition of the Knox shelter, the new scatter-site model has opened around 220 beds, with additional capacity during extreme weather.

The scatter-site initiative is being managed by the Empire Health Foundation, which holds regular meetings with service providers – including those that don’t manage one of the city-funded shelters – to coordinate care and provide feedback on the system.

“Scattered sites and specialized care shelters provide a different level of care for the people who come in,” Garcia said. “Because it’s so small, 30 people, you get to know their barriers, and we’re able to do the things necessary to help them get through those barriers – or is another organization better designed to do that?”

Anneke Calhoun, supervisor of the Cedar Center, another Jewels Helping Hands-managed shelter, was homeless for three years and stayed at the Cedar Center last June. She was addicted to fentanyl and meth, and was referred to the shelter from a detox center, saying she was able to find a support system there that she couldn’t find elsewhere, and later became employed by Jewels Helping Hands.

“I don’t think I would have been able to do that in any other shelter in Spokane,” Calhoun said. “This staff and my coworkers are absolutely still my biggest support system.”

Camille Troxel, an elder at the church, said that church leadership was keen to get involved. The church had been involved decades ago with the creation of what at the time was called the Interfaith Hospitality Network, now known as Family Promise of Spokane, which specializes in homeless families with children. With limited funding and manpower, the opportunity to now use the church itself to support the homeless aligned with their religious principles, Troxel said.

“We have a lot of space, and we’ve been trying to find ways to steward our building in a way that reflects the call of being a Christian,” Troxel said. “For us, it was always an easy ‘Yes.’ ”