COVID-19 closed Providence care center providing basics for the homeless. Will it reopen?
If you’re staying in a shelter, sleeping in your car, or camping outside, one of the biggest daily challenges is finding a bathroom you can use and taking a shower.
One place you could do that, until recently, was the day room at the Providence Community Care Center at State and Franklin.
The center, which opened in 2017, was a collaborative project dreamed up by a who’s who of Olympia’s grassroots homeless service organizations. It aimed to be a one-stop shop for Olympia’s houseless population to access hygiene services and connect with housing, healthcare, mental health, and other essential services in one centralized downtown spot.
On March 13, two days after Thurston County confirmed its first case of COVID-19, Providence announced the day center would be closing indefinitely and moving clinical services to appointment-only.
On the last day it was open to the public, over 300 people visited the center over the course of the day, according to Keylee Marineau, Thurston County’s Homeless Prevention and Affordable Housing Coordinator.
So where are those 300 people going during the day now?
“They’re going nowhere. There’s really no place for them to go,” Marineau said. “They’re scattered throughout the community.”
Other groups step up
The city and county have stepped in to help fill the void, Marineau said, by placing hand-washing stations and port-a-potties in high-traffic areas downtown and next to encampments. But the lack of a day center has led to an increase in the number of people hanging out downtown during the day.
Other homeless service providers have expanded services while still implementing screening and social distancing protocols to slow the spread of the virus.
Interfaith Works, which coordinated the day room at the Community Care Center, responded to its closure by expanding shelter hours at First Christian Church and 2828 Martin Way to 24/7.
“I believe that there are ways that we can manage social distancing,” said executive director Meg Martin.
Another organization that stepped up to meet the demand was Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lacey, which opened its showers and bathrooms throughout April and May. The city also hired advocates to drive vans to and from Sacred Heart, according to Homeless Response Coordinator Teal Russell. After that ended, the city contracted the YMCA to open one day per week for drop-in showers.
Despite these measures, advocates warn that the loss of the day center has left a giant hole – and made it harder for people to follow public health guidance such as washing their hands.
“Every day people ask us, ‘when is it going to reopen?’ I just got asked five minutes ago,” Martin said. “Do you know when Providence is going to reopen the community care center? Every single day people ask. Because it was a lifeline.”
No plan to reopen
After almost four months, it’s unclear to the partner organizations when the center will re-open – and if so, in what form.
“My concern is that it’s going to reopen in a way that is not in line with the model, and therefore it’s going to be less accessible to the people who need it the most,” Martin said. “But those peoples’ needs, to access basic hygiene and health services, haven’t changed and in fact it’s even more acute right now due to the pandemic.“
Even providers that still offer services at the center say they’re in the dark about Providence’s plans for the center. After a hiatus, Valley View Health Service, which provides medical, dental and behavioral health care, returned to the center for scheduled appointments last week.
“We don’t know what the future brings,” said Valley View Health Service CEO Gaelon Spradley. “I’m concerned that we don’t have longer term planning for the hygiene services that the care center provided.”
The lack of communication has been worrisome to Spradley. “It’s kind of a governance issue and we haven’t had the opportunity to address Providence leadership,” Spradley said. “We’re still asking and have been asking for that conversation for a couple of months, even before the COVID outbreak.”
Providence spokesperson Angela Maki declined to speak with The Olympian for this article, but provided a statement over email.
“Over the last few months, the Providence Community Care Center has modified its service delivery to continue to accommodate community needs without operating a day room,” she wrote. Maki said the decision came after consultation with Thurston County Public Health officials Schelli Slaughter and Dr. Diana Yu about the risks of COVID-19 transmission among high-risk populations.
Slaughter confirmed that she advised Providence executives about the risks of keeping the day room open, but didn’t say whether she advised them specifically to close it.
“We encourage all organizations, providers, and businesses that deliver services to high-risk groups (over age 65, underlying health conditions, pregnant, etc.) to carefully consider the safest and healthiest way to do so,” Slaughter wrote in an email to The Olympian.
Public perception
The Community Care Center opened in late 2017. It aimed to be a hub for services, with multiple service providers operating out of the facility, including Sidewalk, Interfaith Works, and Behavioral Health Resources.
“The idea was to build this services center that was interdisciplinary, crossing over healthcare and housing and behavioral health with day room and hygiene services. The day room was a way to build community and allow us easy access where could sort of do ‘inreach’ as we call it,” said Phil Owen, executive director of Sidewalk.
Owen said having all the services in one place cut down on barriers houseless people commonly experience to getting help.
“All we had to do is walk across the hall and make an introduction,” he said.
“Housing and healthcare systems need each other,” Owen added. “The hospital is packed with people experiencing homelessness. It’s affecting their capacity, it’s affecting the delivery of healthcare overall, its affecting costs, and healthcare cannot be delivered effectively to people that are homeless without putting them in homes.”
The Olympia Free Clinic, which moved to the center in early 2019, is continuing to serve patients via appointment. Executive Director Katie Madinger said that being in the central location helped them reach more vulnerable patients the clinic wasn’t able to reach before.
“A number of patients would access our services just because the center was open,” Madinger said.
Studies have shown that houseless people are more frequent users of emergency medical services, and that expanded preventative care – which the Olympia Free Clinic offers – reduces the number of trips to emergency rooms and saves costs for hospitals. (Providence declined to share statistics on ER usage trends among houseless individuals.)
But the center drew frustrated complaints from neighbors, who were concerned about drug use around the center.
“I know Providence is really sensitive to the perception of the Care Center within the immediate neighborhood, and I think that concern has perhaps forced them to consider dramatic changes without involving the rest of the partners,” Valley View’s Spradley said.
“There’s been a major issue with being able to tell the story of the community care center and all of its successes, because the focus has always been so strongly on perception, on what it looks like on the outside,” said Interfaith Works’ Martin.
Martin and Owen both got an email from Providence on July 2 inviting them to a meeting. They couldn’t tell who else was contacted, however, because the email was bcc’ed. Martin says this is a sharp change in communication style from the way the center was run before, which was based on collaborative decision-making.
While Owen believes the mission of the center is more crucial than ever, he is not optimistic that Providence’s leadership is invested in restoring it.
“Unless we see something change, we don’t have any plans to move back to the care center at this point,” Owen said. “And I am heartbroken about that. I’ve put five years of my life into this project. Its critically important to our community. We really need it.”
Martin and Marineau predict that if Providence decides not to re-open the center in its original form, another facility will emerge to replace it – and face the same challenges with upset neighbors.
“The reality is even if we had all the time in the world and billions of dollars, siting [a day center] is the issue,” Marineau said. “Siting it will always be the issue — more than funds, more than the ability to staff it. It will always be siting it.”
Brandon Block is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. He is covering housing and homelessness. His position is supported by Report for America and by donations from Olympian readers, the Washington State Employee Credit Union (WSECU), and the Community Foundation of South Puget Sound.
This story was originally published July 6, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
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