First Native American homeless shelter in the region opens in Milwaukie

Portland-based Native American Youth and Family Center has opened the first Native American homeless shelter in the region, located in Milwaukie at 2400 SE Willard Street. The two-story transitional shelter for Native families experiencing homelessness will provide residents, who begin arriving soon, access to 24/7 on-site support from Native shelter advocates and professionals.

“The official name is kʰwat yaka haws, and that is in the Chinook Wawa language, which is a part of where the original people of this land are from. And that does mean ‘auntie's place,’” said Andulia Sanchez, shelter manager.

Auntie's Place has eight rooms, one of which is an ADA room. Each room has its own kitchenette stocked with appliances and kitchenware, can house up to seven family members comfortably and has a private bathroom. The rooms also have a wool blanket provided by 8th Generation, a Native-run business out of Seattle. When residents leave, they can take the kitchenware and the blanket with them.

“We call our people that come in not ‘clients’ or ‘participants,’ we call them 'relatives,' because traditionally that's kind of what we called each other,” Sanchez said. “When they come in, they hook up with a housing navigator, which will help them with understanding kind of what their barriers are. If they need … birth certificates, Social Security cards, license, you know, any of those kind of things that are barriers to their housing, the navigators help with that.”

Auntie’s Place is 45-day shelter with on-site support from housing navigators, housing retention specialists, a substance use and mental health peer support specialist and a youth advocate. Four family shelter advocates are in the office full time.

“It's meant to be seamless and we've designed it that way so that NAYA's shelter program isn't an island in Clackamas County in the city of Milwaukie where people are kind of hanging out waiting for a housing opportunity,” said Vahid Brown, deputy director of housing and community development for Clackamas County. “They're connected to our continuum of programs and that's true of our other shelter programs, too.”

Auntie’s Place, NAYA’s first project in Milwaukie, came about through a partnership with Northwest Housing Alternatives, the nonprofit affordable housing developer which owns the building, and $1.96 million in funding from Clackamas County through the Metro supportive housing services program. While NAYA has developed several affordable housing projects in the past, Auntie’s Place is the first shelter the organization will operate to support homeless families.

“It brings to our region the first Native American culturally-specific family shelter in history,” Brown said. “It's also a milestone of a type of program that otherwise does not exist in our region.”

The new shelter seeks to address a regional gap in services for Native families while also taking into account cultural needs and specific groups within the larger community.

“We did, and continually do, analyses of our data on people experiencing homelessness in Clackamas County, and in the region, to identify disparate impacts on specific communities,” Brown said. “When you look at people experiencing homelessness in Clackamas County, some groups are experiencing homelessness disproportionately to their relative numbers in the overall population. That's particularly true of Native Americans and Black residents of Clackamas County. Both Black and Native Americans are a relatively small proportion of the overall resident population of the county, but their representative numbers amongst people experiencing homelessness are far and away much higher than that proportion.”

Hand-painted murals adorn the walls in the shelter’s common areas. The paintings tell stories. The mural in the kitchen tells the story of first foods. On some murals a refrain is painted — “never homeless before 1492” — a comment on the Western cultural impact on the land and the people. Auntie’s Place tries to remedy that impact by embracing Native culture.

“When you walk in, it's a different feeling than any other shelter. First of all, we have murals on the wall that are from community members, community artists that we have hired to support the relatives when they come in,” Sanchez said. “When you look at art and when you look at Indigenous art, Indigenous art always tells a story. So that part sets a lot of the groundwork for a difference in the shelter.”

There are two children’s spaces at the facility, and Auntie’s Place will also offer various art and crafts classes.

“We want you to be home. We want you to feel like you're at Auntie's Place. Auntie's Place has all the medicine. Auntie's Place has the teachings. Auntie's Place has the love. Auntie's Place has the acceptance. That's what we're incorporating — all of those things are traditional teachings that we want to come back to,” Sanchez said.

Assistant Shelter Manager Damien Rose is happy for the chance to provide help to families in a culturally grounded environment.

“It's a great opportunity and I'm looking forward to it,” Rose said. “It feels natural. It feels just how it's supposed to be.”