What Is a Transitional Shelter?
If you’ve seen our web site, you will see Parker’s House described as a “transitional home”. What exactly does that mean?
When a person or family loses their home, in most cases, they immediately look for an emergency homeless shelter. These programs take people from the street – whether they have been living in their cars, abandoned buildings/houses or any place they can find that looks reasonably safe – and provide them a warm, safe bed with toilet facilities.
A transitional home is somewhere between an emergency shelter and permanent housing. Parker’s House would probably never take anyone from the streets – we are neither staffed nor trained for such intensive intervention. Instead, we require that residents successfully complete a program at an emergency shelter before coming to Parker’s House.
Our goal is to provide a formerly homeless family with the time and tools needed to create sustainable independence – a term we use to describe when a person can move to permanent housing with a high probability of success, thus drastically reducing the chance of their returning to homelessness.
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CBS Evening News had a segment about a homeless woman, describing the process from homelessness to permanent housing. Here is a link to the story. It is a very effective video showing how easily it is to slip into homelessness.
