Across greater Portland, dollars from Metro’s voter-approved supportive housing services fund are enabling nonprofit organizations to help more people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity than ever before. Metro partners with Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties to use these funds to assist people in a wide range of situations.
Path Home is one of many organizations contracted by Multnomah County’s Homeless Services Department to provide services across several key program areas, using a combination of funding from SHS and other sources.* These programs include homelessness prevention, emergency shelter and placement in permanent housing.
In 2024 alone, Path Home helped 462 families who were experiencing homelessness into stable housing with rent assistance and case management. The nonprofit is a vital part of the county’s social safety net, providing specialized family services in the state with the highest rate of unsheltered homelessness among children in the nation.
The organization has come a long way since its inception in 1994, when a group of community members in Goose Hollow created an overnight shelter in a church gymnasium. The shelter — which could accommodate eight families and was only open in winter — was started in response to a growing crisis of families with children experiencing homelessness on the streets of Downtown Portland and in Forest Park.
Executive director Brandi Tuck started volunteering at the Goose Hollow shelter in 2005 and was hired to lead the organization two years later. In 2009, Path Home opened a day shelter downtown. The following year, it started offering overnight shelter for families year-round, and in 2012, began programming to help move families into housing.
Without housing placement services, Brandi remembers, there was a sense of hopelessness. Families were in survival mode with no end in sight, and the long-term effects of homelessness on the brain make it increasingly difficult for people experiencing it to find stability.
Photo courtesy of Path Home.
Path Home applied everything they had learned about serving families experiencing homelessness to their Family Village Shelter, which opened in the Lents neighborhood in 2019. They closed their other shelter programs shortly after.
One critical point of improvement was the shift from “congregate” shelter — where everyone shares one large space – to private sleeping areas for each family. This, Brandi says, was transformational.
Comparing the guest experience at the Family Village Shelter with Path Home’s previous shelters, staff could clearly see the newer model was supporting people more effectively. At the congregate shelter, “people were not sleeping; people were up all night throughout the evening. Partly because it was loud and noisy, but also just their stress levels were so elevated they just could not get to sleep,” Brandi explained.
At Family Village Shelter, “there was no trauma,” she said. “The families were eating together and playing with each other's kids and having picnics and not fighting with the staff and not stressed.”
Brandi hopes these contrasting shelter experiences can inform decisions about local policy. “There's this interesting conversation in our community right now, where our mayor wants to go back to that model — the night shelter, day shelter model Path Home ran...for many, many years,” she said. Through the experience of running that type of shelter, “we learned a lot about trauma-informed care and what goes on in the brain when someone's experiencing something like homelessness. And we learned that that kind of model of shelter actually exacerbates the trauma that people are experiencing.”
Photo courtesy of Path Home.
Family Village provides shelter for 17 families at a time, between the main building (formerly a church) and apartments in the back. The average stay for each family is about 115 days and 98% of families in the shelter program move into permanent housing.
It was the first shelter in Oregon to feature trauma-informed design. This evidence-based approach helps people get out of survival mode (commonly known as “fight or flight”) and back to using the logical, rational, decision-making part of their brain.
“It's about using natural materials - things like real wood and natural light and stone and water,” Brandi explained. “It's about creating emotional, physical, psychological safety. And about, you know, giving people power, choice and control over how they use their environment.” This means having lots of flexible spaces that can be used in different ways, visually simple spaces with a lack of clutter, and rooms have either natural light or light that mimics natural light.
Guests at Family Village have access to two meals a day — prepared by an on-site chef — and shared laundry facilities, a computer lab, a library, a playground, a garden with produce, and outdoor gathering spaces. They are also welcomed and supported by shelter staff who help during this transitional time, providing emotional support and connection to services and resources that will help guests find stability.
The Family Village journey begins with a call to Multnomah County’s coordinated entry system, 211. Guests are referred to the shelter where they do an intake with staff, who also help with immediate needs like food and clothing. After spending about a week getting settled in, they are assigned a housing navigator with the organization’s rapid re-housing program, who will support them through the process of finding a home. This may include addressing barriers like a past eviction or low credit score.
After guests move into their new homes, a case manager works with them for up to a year to help them find and maintain stability. This may include finding furniture, helping pay utilities, and anything else they need to retain their home. Path Home also provides rapid re-housing services for families who are not shelter guests, referred through 211.
Trista Naught, shelter program assistant manager at Family Village Shelter in Lents.
Trista Naught, shelter program assistant manager at Family Village, has worked for the organization for ten years. Over this time, she’s seen a shift in the demographics of shelter guests. Whereas when she first started most guests were single mothers dealing with substance use disorder and/or domestic violence, many nowadays are two parent families who are simply unable to afford rents, especially when they receive large increases. For single-earner households, “it doesn't really matter how much they're making; one income is just not cutting it,” Trista explained.
Even with the rent assistance offered in Path Home’s rapid-rehousing program, she worries about how families in market rate housing will be able to afford it in the long term. Federal Section 8 rent housing vouchers and housing subsidies are not able to meet the demand, which is why building more affordable housing in greater Portland is essential.
When asked what she likes about this work, Trista reflected, “it's been so many years, I just know in myself now that this is what I'm supposed to be doing, and life is helping others and being of service to others. I think that's ultimately what drew me to it and what why I'm so good at it and why I've done it for so long.”
Providing support for someone experiencing the crisis of poverty and homelessness means staff has to be “that stable person for them while they're breaking down,” said Trista. “It's not always easy, and people can't always do it.” These essential human connections are what make Path Home, and other service provider organizations who help people move from shelter to stable housing, successful.
Ultimately, the best way to help a family experiencing poverty and instability is to prevent them from losing their housing altogether. That’s why Path Home also offers homelessness prevention services, which includes paying back rent and utilities for families who have fallen behind.
This type of service “not only prevents the crisis and trauma and survival mode of, homelessness,” said Brandi, “but it's also the most cost-effective intervention.” Path Home spends about $4,000 per household, compared to about $15,000 to shelter and re-housing a family.
Over the past four years, Metro SHS funds have been used to place over 8,000 households in housing, provide homelessness prevention services to nearly 18,000 households, and support the creation or continued operation of 2,600 shelter beds.
*In addition to Metro SHS and county funds, Path Home’s work is also supported by individual community members, faith communities, local businesses, and foundations.