Sow success with the COTS Hour Seed Fund

Every year in November, we host The COTS Hour: a huge fundraiser where we gather with our community and share stories of hardship, resilience, and triumph. This year, The COTS Hour will be held at 8 a.m., November 14 at the Petaluma Veterans Memorial Hall. We’re expecting 450 people to attend and raise funds in support of our vital programs and services throughout the year.

We wish we could host all of Sonoma County at The COTS Hour, but we know many of you can’t join us because you’ll be out of town or clocking in to work. This year, you can help before the event by giving to The Seed Fund. Your support demonstrates our community’s investment in our neighbors experiencing homelessness – and encourages our guests to give generously on November 14!

Join us and help us continue this crucial work: click here to donate to The Seed Fund and launch your fundraising page today!

Saving the planet one free meal at a time

What does our work at Mary’s Table have to do with global environmental health? Quite a bit!

About 35 percent of all food in the United States never gets eaten—at a huge cost: a greater need for agricultural land; gallons of precious water wasted; and greenhouse gas emissions that went for nothing.

But thanks to all the food donations we use each year at Mary’s Table, 98 tons of perishable food go into people—not landfills. And those scraps that we don’t use go into animals or into compost. Many thanks to Recology for helping us develop a robust composting program.

We couldn’t feed our guests without the support of many, many food providers, including our local grocery stores and farmers.

And our volunteers are absolute climate heroes. They coax every delicious, usable bit out of our fruits and vegetables.

Healthy development happens when kids are safe

Here are a few good bits of news from our Kids First Family Shelter.

“Eddie” clings to his grandmother. She’s his anchor in the world. At school, he couldn’t sit down at his desk without his grandmother by his side, couldn’t make it through the rest of the day once she’d said her goodbyes. After moving into KFFS and finding the stability it provides, Eddie is starting to feel more confident. Two weeks ago, he walked into his classroom all by himself and stayed the entire day. We predict he’ll be able to ride the school bus on his own soon.

When “Valerie” arrived at the shelter, she was shy and wasn’t using speech the way other kids her age do. Today, although no one would call her a chatterbox, she’s begun to relax at the shelter, to come out of her shell, and to speak more. Your support helps give all our kids at KFFS the space to breathe and to feel safe again. Thank you for investing in Sonoma County’s next generation!

Housing lets us breathe

There are few words tenants dread more than, “We’re selling the house.” That’s because those words are usually followed by “And you’re going to have to move.”

Six tenants in COTS’ shared Integrity Housing program recently heard both phrases.  Their landlords had rented to the Integrity Housing program for six years at a very affordable price, but they had reached the conclusion that they had to sell the home.

COTS had to deliver 60-day notices to move to all the formerly homeless tenants. We let them know that we’d try our best to find them new housing within the program, but that we couldn’t make guarantees.

The residents are in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Only one resident brings in income greater than $1,000 per month. All of them have severe and painful health challenges.

“I couldn’t breathe or focus when we got the notice,” one resident said. “I just kept thinking, ‘I am too old to be out on the streets again.’”

“I had no options,” said another. “I didn’t know what to do.”

A husband and wife who live together in the house were preparing for the possibility that they might need to split up—that there might be space and rent money enough for only one of them.

“We were working on housing plans,” said COTS Case Manager Debbie Robbins. “Those were some tough discussions.”

We were determined not to lose hope. COTS had received a grant from the Finley Foundation in 2018 to purchase a house, and we realized we now had an incredible opportunity: if we could buy the property before it went on the market, we could keep our clients housed and generate income to support COTS’ programs for the long-term.

With the help of the Finley Foundation, the generous sellers, and our amazing community, we closed on the house on August 30, 2019! We are so grateful to the following partners and businesses who made this happy ending possible:

• • the Finley Foundation, which provided funding for the purchase.
  • the sellers, Dennis and Terry Merrill, who worked with us in the same of spirit of ease. cooperation and generosity that characterized all their business dealings with us.
  • Bonnie Merrill, a local realtor and past COTS volunteer, who connected us with Dennis and Terry in the first place – and helped bring them into the Integrity Housing program.
  • Dan and Rene Foppe of DNR Pest Control, who donated the necessary pest inspection.
  • Terry Lewis of North Coast Inspection, who donated his inspection services.
  • Rebuilding Together Petaluma, which is going to help us with repairs and upgrades on the property. (Sign up to volunteer at rtpetaluma.com/volunteer!)
  • and Bill Gabbert and Karl Bundesen of Century 21 Bundesen who negotiated the sale and donated all their fees.

With the addition of the house to our permanent Integrity Housing portfolio, we will be able to house clients in Petaluma long into the future. We could not have done it without so many generous community members pitching in to help us make it happen.

“I hope people will see this as a model for providing affordable housing,” said one resident.

Richard Stark, a COTS client and a long-time Petaluma resident whom people might remember from his days playing piano at Copperfield’s, says that he remembers many afternoons chatting with Mary Isaak in her backyard back in the early 1980s. “We were talking about a way forward for humanity,” he said, “about saving the world.”

Mary went on to co-found COTS with her friend Laure Reichek and the help of thousands of supporters.

“I didn’t know it then,” Richard said, “but she really did it. She saved people. And her work saved my life.”

Please join us at The Big Thanks

We can never thank you enough for your support.

But we’d like to try!

Please join us at The Big Thanks at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, October 15 at the Petaluma Woman’s Club.

We’ll show you how we put your support into action—what your donations, your volunteer hours, your advocacy accomplish. And we’ll enjoy great music from Hannah Jern-Miller as well as good company, food and drink.

We are so grateful to you for your support. Thanks to you, COTS can now provide the supports to keep over 400 people in permanent housing annually and 140 people in shelter on any given night.

This is a free event. Please RSVP by clicking here!

Styled for school success

Many thanks to the Petaluma Valley Rotary and the Active 20-30 Club of Petaluma for getting our kids excited about going back to school. New backpacks, school supplies, shoes and clothes help kids feel like they fit in. That’s especially important for the kids in our programs who have often experienced a lot of upheaval and are starting out as “new kids.”

Petaluma Valley Rotary is supplying brand new backpacks stuffed full of supplies and the Active 20-30 Club is taking kids shopping for school clothes. Together, their efforts will mean a better start to the school year for all COTS’ kids and families!

Investing in our children

Sonoma County has invested heavily in Rapid Re-Housing—a program where short-term rental assistance is paired with services to help homeless families stabilize quickly, and soon, shoulder their household expenses independently.

There are good reasons for that investment. According to a 2015 study, five families can be stabilized through rapid re-housing for the same price it takes to house one family in a transitional housing program. We’re finding that study to ring true here in Sonoma County. On average, COTS will pay about $6,000 in rental support to our Rapid Re-Housing landlords as our clients get back on their feet. And over 90 percent of our clients remain housed once our assistance ends.

In our last fiscal year, which ended June 30, we housed more than 200 people through Rapid Re-Housing.In  the month of July, 2019, we housed 45 additional people through Rapid Re-Housing.

Wise and efficient use of our limited resources is good for the entire community. And the beautiful thing is that it’s best for our families, too. Nothing is more disruptive for a child than a period of prolonged homelessness.Permanent housing correlates to better health, better academics and a more successful adulthood.

Thanks to all our supporters for investing in COTS’ life-changing programs and services.

Feeding a crowd and caring for the planet

Over half of the produce grown in the United States goes to waste, according to the Journal of Consumer Affairs of the National Resource Defense Council. Part of the waste comes down to aesthetics: we just won’t buy it if it’s not sleek and pretty.

But anyone who gardens knows that wonky fruits and vegetables taste just as good as their more elegant counterparts.  And anyone who’s been to Mary’s Table knows that we are always on the look-out for fresh produce. We serve over 7000 meals a month, and we’ve pledged to fill each one of them with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Preserve Sonoma Farm Kitchens,  The Center for Spiritual Living and Jacobs Farm Del Cabo  just helped us with that pledge.

Thank you to everyone who came to Business in the Ballroom on July 25 at the Hotel Petaluma. We were thrilled that so many people came out to recognize and commend our incredible business supporters!

Many thanks to the people and organizations who made the event possible: the Hotel Petaluma; the Petaluma Area Chamber of Commerce; Side Dish; Jackson Family Wines; Lagunitas Brewing Company; and Century 21 Bundesen. Thanks to Joy Regan for her lovely photos.

Thanks also to everyone who came to our COTS Community Picnic on July 11 to celebrate the expansion of our free meal program. Now, in addition to our regular lunch offering, our dinners are open to anyone in the community who is having trouble making ends meet. There’s no paperwork involved. Our stalwart volunteers serve lunch between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. and dinner between 5 and 6 p.m.

Rapid Re-Housing Update

Now that COTS’ fiscal year has ended, we are thrilled to share this year’s Rapid Re-Housing numbers. Since July 1, 2018, 195 people, including 82 children, have found housing and support through our program. 

What is Rapid Re-housing? It’s a relatively new approach to homeless services, a state and federal “best practice” informed by a body of research indicating that moving individuals experiencing homelessness into housing quickly – rather than having them endure long stays in a shelter – benefits the interests of both those individuals and the broader community. With a home, people are much better able to take care of their health, increase or stabilize their incomes, and stay clear of trouble. The benefits that a stable home brings to a child is even more pronounced: academic, social and emotional outcomes skyrocket once children are stably housed.  The benefits to our clients translate to reduced healthcare and other public sector costs for the broader community. (Read more about our Housing First approach here.) 

As part of our Rapid Re-Housing program COTS is able to provide time-limited financial assistance and supportive services to clients transitioning out of homelessness. The idea is to find housing that they’ll be able to afford once on their own once our support ends. 

Supportive services help our clients achieve that self-sufficiency and can include help with a job search or with job skills-development, linkage to childcare, healthcare or other services. The services we provide are tailored to each family’s needs and desires. 

We are grateful to the many funders who make this program possible: all our COTS supporters, the Redwood Credit Union Community Fund, the Tipping Point Community fund, the County of Sonoma,  and the City of Rohnert Park.

We look forward to reporting more on our 2018-19 results soon.

In May, we shared the story of our client Dennis, who was recently approved for an affordable senior apartment. We are excited to report that Dennis moved into his new apartment on his birthday in June. Here he is enjoying a little cake in his comfy chair after spending the better part of an hour on the phone with PG and E (a classic rite of passage for every new renter!). The same day he moved in to his new apartment he was back to volunteer in the kitchen, serving our residents.

“Dennis left something here with me,” Mary Isaak Center resident Reggie told us today. “He taught me to persevere. I’m not going to get discouraged.”

Dennis

You can’t count on kindness paying off, but it’s awfully nice when it does.

Dennis was an old hand at camping by creek sides—unnoticed much of the time—when he met an elderly brother and sister who weren’t as skilled. They had no tent, just sleeping bags and scattered bags of possessions out in the open. Dennis came upon them one day as they were on a pedestrian bridge, feeding ducks. “They were green,” Dennis says. “They didn’t know what they were doing.”

He offered them a place at his campsite and helped them get a tent. The trio looked out for each other and kept each other company. Soon, Dennis extended an invitation to another man and their neighborhood was complete. They kept their camp clean and drug free, Dennis says.

Then the brother and sister met Cecily Kagy, COTS Outreach worker. Within a few weeks, she helped them move into a rental.

Cecily had learned about Dennis from the brother and sister she’d helped. Now it was his turn. “I was on the street for eight years,” Dennis says, “and Cecily was the only person who ever approached me to say, ‘I want to help you.’”

“I was hesitant at first,” he says. “I figured it wasn’t going to go anywhere. I figured I’d probably die on the streets.”

It was a belief that made sense. Dennis had lost his rental housing in Petaluma when he was 57, after a long career installing dry wall. 40 years of repetitive use injuries, a bad case of arthritis and a nonwork-related fall that broke his hip and several other bones left him unable to work for long stretches. He camped, mostly, with short stints in shelters or motels. He worked through a temp agency when he could, but he could never save enough to get ahead. When he turned 62 he was eligible for Social Security, but that didn’t provide him enough to save for move-in costs and rent.

Cecily arrived at an opportune time.

He needed to go to court, where the District Attorney was proposing two years’ probation for a camping ticket. Cecily drove him to the Court House, and during a break in the proceedings, they talked about Dennis’ resources and hopes.

In the next days, they got busy. Dennis met Cecily at a Starbuck’s to fill out a housing application. She helped him prepare for his interview. By the time his next court date rolled around, a room had come open in COTS Integrity Housing program and he’d been approved. “When they heard that I had a place lined up, they dropped the charges,” Dennis says. “If it hadn’t been for Cecily, I’d still be homeless and I’d be on probation.”

Now, days away from his 65th birthday, Dennis shares a home with three others. The rent is a stretch—about half of his monthly income—but adds up to less than what he spent on the four or five hotel stays per month he paid for to shower and clean up.

After he spent one uncomfortable night on a twin bed, Cecily helped find him a queen-sized bed, which is a better fit for his six-foot-seven frame.

“The calm, the relaxed way you feel: that’s the biggest difference. I don’t go to sleep afraid that someone’s going to wake me up yelling, ‘Police. Exit the tent with your hands showing.’ I can walk home from the store and I don’t have to watch my back wondering if someone is going to see where I live and rob me or harass me.”

Free from the grind and all the tasks of camping, Dennis is just getting a feel for how to spend his days. One of the last things he did before he moved in was to talk with the other man at his campground, a veteran who’d resisted meeting Cecily. “He found out I was moving,” Dennis says, “and he said, ‘Tell her I’m interested.’”

Housing Changes Everything!

It’s official: April is the coolest month!

Thanks to you, our Outreach Specialists were able to help 24 people on the streets or in local encampments find permanent housing in April.

Your support also meant that 14 people from our emergency shelters were able to move into permanent housing.

Additionally, our Laure Reichek Housing Hub in Santa Rosa placed 13 people in permanent housing all made possible by donors like you who keep our programs running.

Now, Emily can get ready for school in a bedroom instead of the backseat of her mom’s car. She told a COTS staff person that homework is a lot easier now that she can do it at a table in her own apartment.

How cool is that? Thank you!

Showers for all

Keeping clean is tough when you’re camping outside or living in your car. The Mary Isaak Center is open for non-resident showers on Wednesdays. Sign up starts at 11:30 a.m. at 900 Hopper Street, and showers begin after our free lunch program at 1 p.m.

If you know anyone who could benefit, please share the news. And let them know, singing in the shower is not required, but it’s totally welcome.

We also need towels for this program. If you have used towels that are in good condition, we’d be grateful if you’d drop them off at the Mary Isaak Center during normal business hours.

Dennis taking a break volunteering in the kitchen at the Mary Isaak Center

Dennis finds a home

We help people find housing as quickly as possible. “As possible” means something different for each client, however, depending on their income and other circumstances.

We’re rejoicing that Dennis Daggett will be moving into his own apartment soon. It’s been a long wait for him to move into subsidized senior housing, with many twists and turns, including a nasty bout of pneumonia.

A few months ago, his name came to the top on a senior affordable housing waiting list, but his application was denied after the management reviewed his credit report. What they didn’t know was that Dennis had overextended himself to care for a sick spouse. They also didn’t know that he’d been making regular payments on his debts: collection agencies don’t report payments until debts have been paid in full.

We were able to help Dennis successfully appeal that decision, and we’re able to help him with move-in costs, but even after the management changed its mind about his application, Dennis had to wait several more months to move in because the apartment he’d been notified about had been given to someone else.

Through the more than a year that Dennis has been at the Mary Isaak Center, he’s been a stalwart volunteer, helping out in the kitchen and doing chores around the center. He’s a favorite with our community volunteers, who love his courtly ways and the stories of his Hollywood career (including some interactions with Alfred Hitchcock on the set of “The Birds”). We applaud Dennis’ patience and good cheer and we long for a day when someone in his position can find a home much more quickly.

If you’d like to find out more about Dennis’ Hollywood career, check out his book, “The House that Ince Built,” available at the Sonoma County Library.

If you’d like to help him furnish his new home, please contact Kyle Muelrath at [email protected].

Chef Derrick Ng preparing another delicious free meal for our community

Save the date for July 11: COTS Community BBQ

Please save the evening of July 11 for a community barbecue at the Mary Isaak Center: delicious food; live music from the Rivertown Skifflers; and games for kids and grownups alike.

What are we celebrating? Well, thanks to an anonymous funding partner, no one need be hungry or poorly nourished in Petaluma and the south county. A recent grant to Mary’s Table is allowing us to expand!

Right now, at Mary’s Table in the Mary Isaak Center, COTS offers three free meals a day to our residents.

Lunch is open to the entire community and it is chock full of flavorful fresh fruits and vegetables. Starting in July, we can begin providing dinner to the public as well—again, at no charge.

Imagine the impact a second meal will have for people. For some, who can’t make it to COTS for lunch, dinner may be their only square meal of the day. For others, having two meals a day will save them hundreds of dollars each month—important when you’re struggling to get by on a fixed income. One third of Sonoma County residents cannot afford to eat three meals a day, according to the county’s Human Services Department. Here in the south county, those who are struggling can take the grocery bill off their list of worries.

Mary’s Table is also a friendly place, a place to catch up with friends, chat with our volunteers or find out about resources like free tax preparation, adult education, reduced price cell phones, etc.

Every month, we serve over 7,000 meals. With dinners open to the community, we expect to increase that number to over 8,000.

Let a Thousand Fundraisers bloom

How do we know it’s Spring?

Fundraisers are blossoming everywhere you look. Just in April, the Kids at Valley Vista Elementary School raised over $500 in their Chores for COTS fundraiser, while the Windsor Jazz Ensemble played a red-hot concert for us in Healdsburg raising nearly $2,000.

Anyone can raise money to help our clients get back into homes of their own. If you’d like to run a race or auction a prized possession, put on a trivia competition or a cotillion, or simply send an appeal to friends and family, you can become a fundraiser for COTS!

Here’s a sample of upcoming events that are sure to be fun.

When lovely people come together to support a great cause, a good time and good things follow. Thanks to everyone who supported our effort at Hops for Homes at Lagunitas on April 23.

You overwhelmed us with your generosity and good will. Redwood Credit Union offered a $15,000 matching grant and you smashed it! We were able to meet the matching grant in one night by raising $15,424 – meaning more than $30,000 will go to the Kids First Family Shelter for our families and children. We are so grateful to all our guests for being a part of our most successful Hops for Homes ever.

Thank you to the volunteers and staff who walked with COTS in this year’s Butter and Egg Days parade, and thanks to David and Susan Jacoby who loaned us their Model A! We reveled in the parade’s pun theme in honor of Clo the Cow – it gave us a chance to remind spectators that it’s always MOO-ving day at COTS!

COTS won first prize for the Antique or Classic Car (Non-Commercial) category and we can’t wait to start planning for next year’s parade.

We run a lean operation here, but thanks to our supporters, our residents sometimes get a chance to celebrate, take care of themselves, and relax.

In April, Hannah Jern Miller brought down the house at the Mary Isaak Center with a mix of classic rock, folk, country and blues. Hannah came to us courtesy of the nonprofit Bread and Roses. Thank you, Hannah, and thank you Bread and Roses!

Meanwhile, our kids at Vida Nueva – COTS’ permanent supportive housing center in Rohnert Park – had the best spring break ever!

Independence 4-H brought by a miniature petting zoo, and the Active 20-30 Club of Rohnert Park put on a party and an egg hunt that will not soon be forgotten. Thank you!