Photo courtesy of Helena Independent Record. Renee Bauer (left) and Theresa Ortega (right) discuss their team-up for a women's shelter called Ruth's Place in July 2024. Used with permission.
Theresa Ortega of Good Samaritan Ministries and Renee Bauer of Family Promise of Greater Helena talk about teaming up to open Ruth’s Place, a new women’s shelter in Helena.
It’s hard to overstate the connection between domestic violence and a lack of safe or stable housing, especially for women. Researchers have found that over 90% of homeless women have experienced severe physical or sexual abuse at some point in their lives, and 63% have been victims of intimate partner violence as adults. Anywhere between one in four and one in two women cite domestic violence as the immediate cause of their homelessness, and unfortunately, we know that violence is a huge factor in youth homelessness as well.
Right behind immediate safety needs, survivors entering shelter programs like ours at The Friendship Center often cite finding affordable housing as one of their most urgent needs. Challenges plaguing both our region’s housing inventory and affordability are well known to anybody living here in recent years. Short-term or overnight emergency shelter options in Helena for those without housing are even more limited—currently, there’s just one. And despite the elevated safety risks faced by women and children experiencing homelessness, Helena has been without a dedicated emergency shelter for these groups. However, that will be changing soon with the creation Ruth’s Place—a project that Good Samaritan Ministries (GSM) has been at the helm of for the past year.
While the need for Ruth’s Place has never been in doubt, around this time last year, there was good reason to worry about the future of a new women’s shelter in our community. GSM received a permit to open Ruth’s Place as an emergency winter shelter in December 2023, only for the location that the conditional use permit was approved for to be sold the next month. In the months since, the project has found new life in a new location. This summer, GSM Executive Director Theresa Ortega described the natural collaboration they ultimately found with Family Promise of Greater Helena as “the team-up we needed.” Speaking with Theresa in the process of finalizing architectural plans for their own shelter, Family Promise Executive Director Renee Bauer found that with minimal modifications, they could create a building with shelter facilities for both their clients, among whom there is considerable overlap.
GSM and Family Promise continue to raise funds for operational costs as they await a city permit to break ground on Ruth’s Place, and they are hopeful that the new shelter could open as early as this spring if all else goes smoothly. To talk about the importance of collaboration in serving our community’s most vulnerable neighbors, and the nuances of developing shelter and housing solutions for neighbors whose challenges and needs are often multilayered, the leaders of the two organizations behind Ruth’s Place were kind enough to respond to some of our questions. With Theresa leading us off and Renee taking us home, we hope you appreciate their insights as much as we did. We also encourage you to consider helping these agencies keep the momentum going for Ruth’s Place to open its doors this coming spring by donating in support of it!
Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q&A with Theresa Ortega
To get us started, we're wondering if you could talk a little about GSM’s services. In some ways, you all are very visible with a thrift store location in a high-traffic part of Helena, but you do a lot that's probably not as obvious to folks who don't access your services. What are some areas of your mission that people may know less about?
TO: Most of the community knows that GSM is a thrift store (voted Best Thrift Store in Helena 2024!). What a lot of people do not know is that we are so much more than a thrift store. We provide services to individuals and families, especially to those most in need, through our assistance ministry and our in-store vouchers. Our neighbors can come in and receive clothing, household items, diapers, and various other items at no cost from our store. And our Assistance Ministry provides financial assistance to people experiencing housing instability or needing help paying for medical or dental expenses, daycare expenses, or auto repairs. GSM also operates Our Place, the drop-in center that serves mostly the unhoused population in Helena and provides daily recovery meetings and services like peer support, and help with applying for public assistance or obtaining documents necessary to get into housing.
Can you talk a little about the limited shelter options that unhoused folks in our community currently have, and why Ruth's Place is filling such a critical gap?
TO: In Helena we have God’s Love, which as of right now, requires you to have a job to be eligible to stay in their program. There are also programs like YWCA Helena for women and children with substance use disorders, and The Friendship Center, which helps shelter people who have experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking. These are all great programs, but the need in the community is so great that there is often a waiting period before someone can get into those shelter programs.
Unfortunately, during this waiting period, there is nowhere safe for women to go at night. This is typically where you see clients going back to their abusers or back into their addictions, sometimes falling back far enough that they may not seek help when the help is available. This is the gap we are hoping for Ruth’s Place to fill. We’ve known there’s a need for a program like this. What we were unable to find before teaming up with Family Promise was a space for Ruth’s Place to be.
How have you seen the need for services change during your time with GSM? What are some of the biggest challenges to delivering services? And thinking about those you serve, what are some of the biggest barriers they face to accessing services?
TO: I think the need for services provided by GSM and other nonprofits and mental health providers has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, there are so many levels to why this is happening. There is still so much stigma around someone reaching out for assistance. Another reason is the affordability of life in general. GSM is only able to provide a certain dollar amount per family, per year. With rent costs being so high, even with our assistance, families are still struggling to make ends meet.
A point we often make when we're talking about the number of people we serve is that we know we're only skimming the surface when it comes to meeting the true need in our community. There are a lot of reasons for that—some specific to agencies like ours, others are very common among our partners. When you think about services like shelter and financial assistance, how do you convey to people how much of a need there is, above and beyond the essential assistance and support you already provide?
TO: I think one of the education pieces we like to talk about is that we need to remove the “us versus them” mentality. We are neighbors and we need to take care of our neighbors in the community. There is a spectrum of people we see who need assistance. We see people who are unhoused, have no income, or are maybe struggling with substance use disorder or a mental health disorder.
There are also neighbors who fall into the ALICE group, a term coined by United Way, which is an acronym for Asset Limited Income Constrained but Employed. These neighbors are working, and their income is often too high to qualify for public assistance, but due to the cost of living, they cannot afford to put food on the table or pay for their medications. So, when we look at the population spectrum that this covers, that means most in our community are in need of some help.
We believe that partners throughout our service region are essential to being able to provide the most holistic care and support possible. In your mind, how important is your partnership and coordination with other agencies in, not just meeting basic needs, but really trying to help people on a path to safety, thriving, and independence?
TO: Collaborating with other agencies is very important when we provide assistance to clients. When someone is in crisis, it can be really difficult to think of the next steps or what needs to be done to stabilize for the future. Working with other agencies and providing a warm handoff helps ensure clients have the best possible chance of success.
What keeps you energized and inspired in your role? Working with folks who are in some of the most vulnerable and difficult stages of their lives cannot be easy and critical projects can hit discouraging roadblocks. How do you take the ups and downs in stride?
TO: Our Outreach Services staff are dedicated to providing for those most in need throughout our community. Folks that we hire often have lived experiences and understand what it is like to be in the position of our clients. Preventing burnout is high on the list of ways GSM supports our staff since we have a highly emotional setting. Most times, GSM and Our Place staff are very open with each other at meetings, or with individuals on concerns and how to overcome struggles.
Last but not least, as we head into the holiday giving season where folks are maybe thinking of year-end or new year donations, how can folks support Ruth’s Place?
TO: We have the brick and mortar for Ruth’s Place. What we are building at this point is operation funds. We ask the community to look at Ruth’s Place as their women’s shelter—a community project to help support a safe place for women to move to the next step in their lives, and move off the streets or other unsafe places, so they can begin to heal.
Q&A with Renee Bauer
Similar to the question we're asking Theresa for starters, can you talk a little bit about Family Promise's services? What are the areas of your work that the community is most familiar with, and what areas are maybe lesser known or understood?
RB: Family Promise of Greater Helena provides shelter to children and their families. So, children are the key: To participate in our programs, you must have children. We offer our shelter services and that includes programing in a multitude of types—parenting, financial literacy, budgeting, and circle of security to name a few.
We provide everything for a family while they are in our program, with a goal of helping them save money so they have resources once safe and secure housing is located. We also have a prevention program, diversion program, stabilization program, and the Community Response Program which is a diversion and training program for parents who may need assistance to avoid CPS intervention. Additionally, we provide services in Townsend and Broadwater County.
A big reason we wanted to feature you all and GSM for this month’s spotlight is to recognize your progress toward opening Ruth's Place. Getting this women's shelter off the ground has had a lot of twists and turns. When, after the first location planned for Ruth's Place fell through, did you and Theresa realize Family Promise might have a solution that could keep the ball rolling on this project?
RB: Family Promise has been in the planning process for our shelter for over four years. We were finalizing the architectural plans when Theresa contacted us, and we began discussions about how both client bases could work in one building if the building was designed correctly. With a few minor modifications to our plan, we found it easy to partner with GSM on a site that can shelter both of our clients.
You've already spoken about this a bit in recent interviews about Ruth's Place, but is it fair to say the close proximity may ultimately improve the experience of folks who might need to access services from both organizations?
RB: Both organizations have worked together for years to provide mutual assistance for the populations we serve. We refer folks to GSM, and they refer to us. It is a natural evolution to have shared shelter space and a more prudent use of community resources and programming that are already in place.
In the time you've been with Family Promise, how have you seen the need for your services change or grow—particularly as housing availability/affordability has reached the fever pitch we're currently seeing? What are some of the biggest challenges to delivering services? And thinking about those you serve, what are some of the biggest barriers they face to getting the assistance they need?
RB: The need for shelter and programming really began to grow during COVID. Since that time, we have consistently had wait lists for folks to get into shelter or programming. The high cost of housing in Montana has exacerbated the need, and there is a shortage of affordable housing—all coming together to create the perfect storm for families and people who rely on assistance to allow them to afford housing.
Today it takes much longer to get families housed than it did prior to 2022, and that results in them staying in shelter longer. Shelter is never a good long-term solution for families. With more community partners, we could speed up the time it takes to get families into safe and secure housing.
When you think about the families and children you serve, how do you convey to people how much of a need there is, above and beyond the assistance and support you already provide?
RB: It is difficult to convey the challenges people with children have when struggling for safe and secure housing solutions. Let me explain a consistent thing that happens to these folks: They will almost never be the “homeless” individuals we see standing on the corners or asking for money. If they are seen with children doing such things, they will begin to be monitored, and without safe and secure housing they risk losing their children.
Families with minor children who find themselves in a homeless position almost always are hidden. What that looks like: They find what they perceive is a safe place to park a car to sleep in, they often won’t tell anyone they are homeless, and they usually have very low self-esteem from the position they find themselves in even though it’s often not their fault. They are unable to really provide basic nutritious meals for their kids. The struggles are endless.
The need for shelter for families in Helena is very underserved. Since 2023, we have had a consistent wait list of 28 families to get into our program. And that is only because we quit taking names at 28. The list should be twice that size. Families are the hidden homeless and it is a significant issue in Helena. We once had a family whose children constantly asked for friends to sleep over. After two weeks of this, we found out the friends sleeping over were also homeless and had no shelter. They were one of the hidden families.
In your mind, how important is your partnership and coordination with other agencies in our community in, not just meeting basic needs, but really trying to help people on a path to safety, thriving, and independence?
RB: Helena is blessed to have many agencies in the community that serve to enrich the lives of residents. We are partners with every one of them. We refer people on a daily basis, and receive referrals daily from other agencies. I believe every group fills a niche in serving our community, and all are necessary. We all share programming on a regular basis.
Last but not least, what keeps you energized and inspired in your role? Working with folks who are in some of the most vulnerable and difficult stages of their lives cannot be easy, especially when meaningful projects get stalled. How do you take the ups and downs in stride?
RB: One of the reasons I believe our partnership with GSM for the Ruth’s Place shelter is perfect is because Theresa and I have a lot of the same ideas about how to stay motivated. We both believe that progress and successes far outweigh the losses. We strive to get it right as often as we can and see the wins in creating success in our community. We are both inspired to continue finding ways to make good things happen.
The Friendship Center is just one of many organizations in our community working to ensure everyone is supported with care and dignity. Each month, we highlight some of the fantastic people and organizations that we partner and collaborate with in our email newsletter. Sign up to make sure you don't miss a partner spotlight and learn more about some of the services available in our community.
Info on Domestic Violence and Housing
Domestic Violence, Housing, and Homelessness (National Network to End Domestic Violence)
The Intersection of Domestic Violence and Homelessness (NNEDV)
Background on Ruth’s Place
Helena City Commission approves location for homeless shelter Montana Free Press | December 2023
Downtown Helena business owner to buy proposed emergency shelter site Helena Independent Record | January 2024
‘Let's do it right’: New collaborative to open women’s shelter Ruth’s Place Helena Independent Record | July 2024
With winter approaching, when will the women's shelter Ruth's Place open? KTVH | November 2024
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