Got this one the other day, h/t AllisonInSeattle
Every woman has a story at Mary's Place.
Jessica Mackey has been homeless for three months; she was evicted from a room she was renting. Her kids are in foster care. Her fiancé? Who knows.
Linda Gordon sells Real Change and comes into Mary's Place — the city's only emergency day shelter for women and children — to use the phone and search for housing.
Plymouth Church members Jessie Attri and Doris Schaefer come here to do God's work. Jessie gives the women hand-massages while, beside her, Doris washes their feet.
Shelter may find itself homeless
Okay, what's happening here is that they started out being housed at the First Methodist Church in Seattle, and that worked for fifteen years.
Then the church sold its sanctuary and I guess threw them out...these nice people found housing via the Lutherans for a bit. This was around 2007.
The Methodists promised Mary's Place they could come along when the new sanctuary was built...but then they got a new pastor and he's playing hardball; he wants the shelter to become part of his church's ministry.
Well, homeless ladies; I guess you better religious up, now?
According to Mary's Place director Marty Hartman, Brown wanted the shelter to become part of his church's ministry.
But Hartman just can't: "Our mission is that we are open to women of all faiths, and no faiths," she told me on Friday. "And to align ourselves with one faith would compromise our mission and donor base."
Well, don't YOU just totally rock, Marty Hartman?
Some more Seattle homeless links:
http://www.youthcare.org/...
http://www.youthcare.org/...
http://www.youthcare.org/...