From Down and Out on the Streets to a Place of Refuge

When Florence Bowers arrived at the YWCA’s shelter for homeless women in Santa Ana several weeks ago, she was six days shy of her 45th birthday. Other than the roof over her head, there was precious little to celebrate.

Her last two relatives had died in December. Around the same time, she fell ill with cancer and fluid on the brain and lost her job as a cashier.

Without an income, Bowers was forced from her San Clemente apartment. She slept on the beach, where she fought bone-gripping chill for eight days before an Episcopal priest brought her to a women’s shelter in Orange. From there it was on to the YWCA.

“I’m just pretty grateful to have a place to live,” she said last week, sitting in the lobby of the shelter.

In the 15 months since it opened, the 38-bed shelter has offered physical and emotional refuge to more than 450 women.

“I’m real proud of what we’ve done,” said executive director Mary Douglas, “but to say it’s not been a struggle would not be appropriate. . . . We’ve really had to work hard not to be done in by it.”

The first struggle was simply to open the shelter’s doors after it was built.

A fund-raising campaign was based on the shelter’s $800,000 construction cost. But the bill for the shelter, part of the YWCA building at 1411 N. Broadway, came in at more than $1.1 million, wiping out the first year’s $200,000 operating budget.

“We’ve been living hand to mouth, month to month,” Douglas said.

Once the doors opened, YWCA officials began the shelter’s mission: to guide its residents, about 70% of whom are from Orange County, back into society’s mainstream by helping them find jobs and permanent housing.

“We said from the beginning that we’d only assist women who’d help themselves,” Douglas said.

To determine those willing and able to help themselves, shelter officials interview all women seeking a bed and room. Those who can afford it are given one of the shelter’s 12 beds for paying residents, which average about $19 a night. Residents who stay in one of the 26 free beds generally have to leave within 60 days.

Some of the women have jobs but can’t afford an apartment yet. Cathy, a resident and a 24-year-old waitress at a coffee shop, said she plans to move to Fountain Valley soon.

“Everything’s all right,” she said cheerfully last week. “No sob story here.”

Other women aren’t as fortunate. JoAnne Pearson went broke several years ago after an accident settlement disqualified her from receiving disability payments for an injured leg.

Pearson, 47, a daughter of migrant farm workers who is the mother of four, described herself as “not the job type.” Yet she is participating in the shelter’s job counseling program, which she called “a revelation,” although she still isn’t certain what job she is suited for.

But the shelter’s counseling and social programs, she said, give her “a direction, a path. It helps you organize your days and your thoughts and ideas.”

In helping women like Bowers and Pearson, shelter officials also helped silence mild criticism that arose when the facility first opened. Because most of the women would be asked to pay for their rooms, some homeless advocates complained that the county’s truly needy wouldn’t be served.

Now that a majority of the shelter’s rooms are offered free, though, the complaints have disappeared.

“I think they’re doing a fine job now,” said Jean Forbath, who runs Share Ourselves, a private Costa Mesa agency that helps the homeless.

Douglas says she doesn’t know how many of the shelter’s residents actually make it back into the mainstream. But shelter officials do know that more needs to be done.

Shelter director Diane Russell said another part of their struggle “is having to turn them away every night and day. . . . You’re dealing with women with some amazing crises.”

Meanwhile, Florence Bowers quietly copes with her own crisis, spending nights at the shelter and much of her days at UCI Medical Center undergoing cancer treatments.

Asked where she will live when she has to leave the shelter after two months, Bowers shook her head. “I am so busy trying to get medical care,” she said, “I really don’t have time to think about having a place to live.”