Church at the Park

09/01/2026

Back to School Supply Drive

Kids staying as guests at our Family Site are getting ready for a new school year — and we'd love your help making sure they walk in with everything they need.

We're collecting 50 each of:
- Spiral-bound lined notebooks (70 or 80 pages)
- Safety scissors
- White glue (Elmer's-style)
- 24-count crayon packs
- Household-size tissue boxes
- Refillable water bottles of each

Easiest way to give: shop our Amazon list and ship directly to us → https://a.co/05Ztzh5k

Ship to:
Elmarie Parker
3749 Portland Rd. NE
Salem, OR 97301

Questions? Reach Chaplain Elmarie at [email protected] or 971-372-0701.

Every notebook and glue stick is a small vote of confidence in a kid who's ready to learn. Thanks for showing up for our neighbors.

08/28/2026

To everyone who followed along with us this week: thank you.

Supportive Housing Week isn't really about a hashtag or a calendar date — it's an invitation to slow down and actually understand a model of care that, when done right, changes lives in lasting ways.

This week we talked about housing, choice, dignity, accountability, relationship, and community. We talked about what supportive housing is, why permanence matters, the scale of need nationally and locally, who this work is built for, and the community connections that make it succeed. But underneath all of it is a simple question worth sitting with: what does it mean to belong to a community where someone doesn't have to be "fixed" before they're welcomed home?

None of that understanding happens without people like you taking the time to read, share, and ask questions. Awareness is often the first step toward real, sustained support, whether that's advocacy, volunteering, or simply talking about this work more accurately with the people in your life.

Permanent Supportive Housing is one of four core focuses in our own work, alongside Collaborative Outreach and Navigation, Housing-Focused Sheltering, and Workforce Development. We're committed to this work not just during designated weeks, but all year, because the need doesn't take a break, and neither do the people doing the work of rebuilding their lives. This work is never done alone. It takes all of us willing to keep showing up, whether that looks like volunteering your time, donating to sustain programs like the Coral Women's House, sharing what you learned this week with someone else, or simply checking in on a neighbor.

find out how to get involved at churchatthepark.org

We're grateful for this community, grateful for our neighbors who trust us with their stories, and grateful for supporters like you who help make this work sustainable.

Here's to more people having a place to call home, and to the communities that help make that possible.

08/28/2026

Pictured: Coral Women's House Staff

Supportive housing isn't a building. It's a network — and sometimes, it's a person sitting with you for hours, listening to your story.

At its best, this model only works because a whole network shows up: case managers, peer support, healthcare providers, chaplains, and neighbors willing to welcome someone back into community. Residents themselves are part of that network too. Our tenants aren't simply receiving support; they're neighbors who show up for one another every day. Quality standards for supportive housing call for exactly this: housing paired with a real community of support, not isolation.

We saw this recently at Coral House. Jess, our chaplain there, shared about Kathy (name changed), one of our longest-tenured residents. Health struggles had made it hard for Kathy to keep up with her space, and her room had slowly filled with belongings she couldn't manage alone. She hadn't slept on her actual bed in years, resting instead on a mat laid over the piles.

Our team came alongside her, not to fix her space for her, but with her. Support isn't something we do to people, it's something we do with them. They listened, gave her choices, respected what mattered to her, and stayed alongside her while she did something genuinely difficult. Together, they organized her belongings, cleared roughly 50 bags of garbage, and kept what mattered safe. Kathy got a new mattress and, finally, a real night's sleep.

But the team will tell you the best part wasn't the organizing, it was the hours spent listening. Every item in Kathy's room held a memory, a person, a chapter of her life. Sorting through her belongings became sorting through her story, together.

That's the piece of supportive housing that's hardest to measure and easiest to miss. Sometimes support means helping someone do something they couldn't do alone. Sometimes it means sitting beside them while they figure out what they want. And sometimes, it simply means staying. During Supportive Housing Week, we wanted to highlight this specifically, because Kathy's story is a reminder that stability isn't just square footage. It's being seen.

08/27/2026

Photo Credit: Coral Women's House resident Julie

Numbers can feel abstract until you see what they mean right here at home.

In our own community, the 2025 Point-in-Time Count found 2,154 people across Marion and Polk Counties experiencing homelessness — 953 of them unsheltered, sleeping outside, in cars, or in places never meant for people to live. These aren't distant statistics from another state; these are our neighbors, the people we pass on our streets every day.

At the same time, there are real signs that coordinated investment in permanent supportive housing works. Statewide, Oregon Housing and Community Services reports that 86% of households served through its homelessness programs remain stabilized in housing for six months or longer, and permanent supportive housing funded through the state has helped rehouse thousands of Oregonians experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Just north of us, in the Portland metro region, an average of 92% of households placed in permanent supportive housing stayed housed a full year later — proof that when housing is paired with the right ongoing support, people don't just move in, they stay housed.

Behind every percentage is a person who had somewhere safe to return to. Someone who had the stability to address a health concern, reconnect with family, pursue work, or simply rest. The numbers show us the outcomes, and the human stories tell us what those outcomes can mean.

That's the outcome we're working toward here in Marion and Polk Counties too. And it's worth naming clearly: outcomes like these are rarely created by one program or one person. It takes tenants, housing staff, case managers, peer supports, chaplains offering spiritual care, healthcare providers, community partners, donors, and neighbors like you. These numbers reflect a community effort, not a solo one.

Every one of these numbers represents someone with a name, a story, and a life they're working to rebuild. That's exactly why this work matters, and why we're grateful for a community that shows up for it.

Sources:
Marion County 2026-2030 Consolidated Plan (2025 PIT Count)
Metro Supportive Housing Services Regional Annual Report

08/27/2026

08/26/2026

Photo Credit: Coral Women's House resident Julie

Myth: People have to "earn" their apartment — hit sobriety milestones, complete a program, or prove good behavior before they're allowed to stay housed.

Truth: Residency in Supportive Housing isn't contingent on behavior. People sign a standard lease and carry the same rights and responsibilities as any other renter. Services like counseling, healthcare access, and job support are offered — but they're voluntary, not conditions of staying housed.

This is often where people misunderstand Housing First. It doesn't mean "anything goes." People still have leases, rights, responsibilities, and expectations, just like any tenant. What changes is that we don't treat someone's challenges as evidence of whether they're worthy or unworthy of housing.

This distinction is the whole foundation of the model. Decades of work in this field have shown that people are far more likely to succeed in recovery, employment, and reconnecting with family once they have stable housing first, not after.

Most of us learned how to be good tenants while we already had a home. We learned to budget by overdrafting an account, navigate conflict with a neighbor, care for a space, communicate with a landlord, and recover from a hard season, all while still having somewhere to live. Supportive housing extends that same opportunity to people who may not have had that foundation.

Asking someone to solve addiction, trauma, or unemployment while still homeless is asking them to do the hardest work of their life with none of the stability the rest of us take for granted.

Supportive Housing flips that order. Housing isn't the reward for progress. It's the ground progress gets built on.

This is one of the models we lean on in our own work, and this week we're taking time to talk about why it matters, not just as policy, but as a real, dignified path for our neighbors. One of the biggest tensions in this work is learning that these things aren't opposites: we can believe people deserve dignity and still hold expectations. We can protect a community while continuing to walk alongside an individual. Holding both is what makes this model work.

08/25/2026

This week is Supportive Housing Week

"I don't live in Cascade Park anymore. I deserve to have nice things." A newer Coral House resident said this to us recently. The "nice things" she meant were a table - where she could sit, eat a meal, and set her own home. But getting a table meant letting go of some of the things she'd been holding onto, and that wasn't easy.

When someone has experienced homelessness, holding onto things can make sense. There are tenancy expectations that need to be addressed, and there is also a person whose relationship with belongings that have been shaped by the reality of living outside. Both things can be true at the same time. With support, clear goals, compassionate accountability, and people walking alongside her, this guest was eventually able to make room for that table along with a realization - a trusting of those around her, and a small claiming of someone saying, "I live here. This is my home. I deserve to have nice things."

Supportive housing means a real lease, with real terms, with someone's name on it. They pay rent. They have the same rights as any other tenant in our community.

What makes it "supportive" is what comes alongside that lease — but it's more than a list of services. At Coral House, support is also relationship: peer support, community, having people who know you, who notice when you're gone, who listen to you, celebrate your wins, help you set goals, and keep showing up when things get hard.

That's a huge part of what makes the word "supportive" actually mean something. There's no time limit and no requirement to prove you're "ready" before you're allowed to have a home. The home comes first, because stability is nearly impossible to build while you're still trying to survive without one. A stable home gives people a foundation from which they can work on everything else in their lives. Housing doesn't solve every challenge, but it creates the space and stability from which people find the capacity to navigate those challenges.

We'll be sharing more all week: what the need looks like locally and nationally, how this fits into the work we do every day, and how you can be part of it.

08/16/2026

Heaven Woods, Case Manager at the Young Adult Shelter, shares how someone’s willingness to see her potential helped change the course of her life, her family, and the way she now serves others.

"I connect with second-chance employment on a very deep level. I had struggled with addiction since I was 12 years old and was able to get clean in 2017 for three years. I had a molar pregnancy in 2021 and, unfortunately, tried to take my life by relapsing. I ended up sending myself into a year-and-a-half-long drug-induced psychosis that ended with me begging my lawyer to get me a deal rather than have my release hearing because I didn't want to go back out and live that way anymore.

I was desperate, so rather than be released and hope I made it to a bed opening at a treatment facility, I took a 31-month plea deal. I was incarcerated for 20 of those months, and when I was released, the first thing on my list was to get a job so I could support myself and my daughter again. The only luck I had was with part-time jobs. At one point, I had two of them until I found Church at the Park.

They gave me a chance, seeing beyond my background and truly seeing the human sitting in front of them and the potential she held. Being hired by Church at the Park and given that second chance meant getting to keep my daughter full-time. It meant paying off all of my fines and getting off parole six months early. It meant getting my own place and being able to support not only my daughter but now also my son. It meant me staying sober and achieving over 4 years of sobriety. It meant finding community and purpose in the past I carry with me.

I hope people are able to understand that change happens, that people have the free will to wake up one day and decide they don't want to live a certain way, or that they do want to live a certain way. Labeling people by their background or the mistakes they made in the past not only takes away their possible future potential, but it also takes away their chance to change, to do something different, and to be seen as the whole humans they are.

08/11/2026

Meet Rosa, Case Manager at our Family Shelter

Benedita, Manager at the Family Shelter, shared this about Rosa:

"Rosa is truly a core part of CCS. She is intentional in every relationship she builds with guests, staff, and community members, consistently going above and beyond to support participants in achieving their goals. Her guidance helps individuals navigate complex systems on their path toward self‑sufficiency, and her nurturing, caring personality brings a bright light to the site each day. Rosa supports all staff with kindness and reliability, and she creates a safe, welcoming space for children to play games or color in her office. We are genuinely grateful for all that Rosa does and the positive impact she brings to our community."

And here is what Elmarie, Chaplain at the site, shared:

"Rosa serves with a generous heart and welcoming smile! I see this by how comfortable the children at our site are in approaching her and by how empowered their parents are in seeking both housing and employment. Rosa is also a resourcer extraordinaire! Her love for researching new resource opportunities and networking with other community agencies is part of what allows her to support our guests in such a beautiful way. Thank you, Rosa, for the heart and energy you bring to your work every day!"

08/10/2026

Heaven, a Case Manager at our Young Adult Shelter, recently sat down with Margarito to hear his story. In his own words:

"My name is Margarito. I'm an outgoing person, a team player. I like it when my community is good with each other. I've been playing basketball since preschool. I'm a family person and love my family. I dropped out of high school and am working on getting my GED.

Life before moving into the YAS shelter was stressful and hard; I used in to live in a house and that ended in 2022 when we got kicked out for the rent going up. We had to pay our last month and left the house. Traveled to Grants Pass then O’Brien. Stayed there for two years. It was a blessing but was rough. We came back here in 2025; I chose to live on the streets and not be a burden in the car where my dad and my brother had been staying. My dad and I used to get into it a lot, due to egos. So, I stayed outside, I slept at the carousel downtown. I went to HOST and it took 5 and a half months and I was able to get into the Young Adult Shelter and it was a blessing.

At first it was rough — I was in my own world and on w**d. I looked around on site and saw a mirror, and I didn't want that for myself. I wanted to be clean so I'd be prepared when job opportunities came. I stopped in March 2026 and it changed me.

Staff and people around me saw good in me. Sonny (HYB Counselor) and I hadn't seen each other since 2018, back when I did drug and alcohol counseling with him at the Boys and Girls Club. On March 2nd, I gave all my w**d to Sonny to dispose of. I've now surpassed my longest clean time — 4 months.

Since being at YAS, I got my first job, joined the HOME Youth internship to work on my GED, set up a bank account, and completed a landscaping program. I'm getting well known in my community for doing positive things. You can't change everyone, but I want to show them that change is good.

C@P and HYB have changed me into a better person. I'm talkative now, eager to form connection, because good connection will get you somewhere — as long as you put yourself out there.

In the future, I want to own a business and help others in need. Even if it takes time. Go at your own pace."