Making Housing Permanent

Since the beginning of our fiscal year in July, we’ve helped 153 clients find housing through our Rapid Re-Housing program! March looks like it’s going to be an exciting month, so stay tuned for updates.

But finding housing is of little value unless people have the financial and social resources to keep their housing.

That’s why about half of our program staff members are dedicated to helping people secure housing while the other half provide the support people need to stay housed.

Support can mean many things: rental assistance; job search and training resources; and help with budgeting and personal finance skills, securing child care, or navigating courts and bureaucracies.

Pictured: COTS’ Outreach Specialist Cecily Kagy listens to a COTS client

Outreach and Assistance in Rohnert Park

“I’m meeting people who have been homeless for so long they’ve lost all faith and hope in humanity,” Cecily Kagy says.

“And I get to help them. I love my job.”

Cecily is our newest outreach worker, serving the community of Rohnert Park. Until recently, she worked as a housing navigator at our Mary Isaak Center. Her office there was cramped, but compared to her current working conditions, it was the Taj Mahal.

“I pulled up a sheet of cardboard to sit down next to one gentleman earlier this week. He was under a bush, and I wanted to be able to make eye contact,” Cecily says. She learned that the gentleman was employed fulltime but crippled by a child support obligation that had been set while he was making much more money. In order to pay, he’s been camping for more than a year. Cecily helped him get into a shelter bed and is helping him with a child support modification request.

She keeps boots in her car so that she can muck around creek beds and talk with the people who live on them. She also keeps her dress shoes handy so that she can drop in to local businesses to meet the owners and let them know about her work and how they get in touch with her. “I try to meet at least one or two business people every day.”

Cecily’s position is funded by the Sonoma County Community Development Commission, and she serves an area where there are many people in need of help.

How many? Nick Bennett, Rohnert Park’s Environmental Coordinator, estimates that there are over 60 encampments in town—many of them along the city’s fragile water ways—along with numerous people living in vehicles. The Rohnert Park School system reports that there are over 40 homeless children in the city’s schools.

Until recently, Rohnert Park’s only resources to help the homeless while protecting health and safety were the police and a private security firm that patrols the creeks at night. “None of us are social workers,” Nick says. “Cecily comes out here, and she’s disarming and approachable. At the same time, she’s not a pushover. She’s solution oriented, and I watched her build connections with people.”

After only two weeks on the job, Cecily is excited about many things: getting six people safely indoors in shelter, rehab or housing; convincing a group of campers to clean their space and bring it further back from the water (“We’ll get them inside soon,” she says); making a connection with a young pregnant woman who’s tired of living in a soggy tent behind a big box store; helping an elderly brother and sister apply for an open apartment in an affordable housing complex. “All my time at the Mary Isaak Center was well spent because I know how the system works and what the resources are,” she says.