The Second Step

How someone reaches the shelter

The organization opened as the Prescott Area Women's Shelter. Around 2013 it took the name Prescott Area Shelter Services, because by then it had begun serving men, single fathers, and families that included a man. The facility Carmen Frederic runs today is a 26-bed dormitory-style communal shelter for women and women with children, and it is often full.

Most referrals arrive by phone, from other organizations in town, from the hospital, and from the police, usually about someone who has lost housing and needs a safe place. People also walk up to the front door; Carmen mentions three women who did that the day before the interview. PASS tries to run a phone screening first, partly to establish whether a bed exists at all.

The screening covers health concerns, substance use and mental health, whether the woman is working and has income, whether she has children, whether she has animals, and what brought her to homelessness. Carmen calls these the basic questions. When the answers fit the program and a bed is open, the call ends with logistics: a specific day and time to arrive. That might be the same day, the next day, or several days out if she is traveling from farther away.

The first day, and the first week

Arrival is unhurried. There is a short amount of paperwork and a tour of the building. The guest washes her clothes and takes a shower, and staff help her make up her bed and put her belongings away.

That bed is hers for the next ninety days, along with a box with a lock on it. The space is not reassigned, and the guest gets used to her own area. Volunteers and staff are on site through the first days to explain how the place runs.

No goal work happens immediately. Carmen's reasoning is that moving into an unknown living situation with a room full of strangers is traumatic on its own, and that people need time and answers before they can think past it. At about the one-week mark the guest names what she needs to accomplish, and staff sit down with her and point her toward the services that will get her there. Guests range from 18 to their 80s, some alone and some with children, so no two lists look alike.

“And their place that they get is theirs now permanently for 90 days. So it's their space.”

Carmen Frederic · 4:19

Why the window is ninety days

Carmen's explanation for ninety days is about the living environment. Communal emergency shelter, she says, is not a healthy way for people to live; humans normally live alone or with family, in a setting they are used to. The window is there so nobody settles into an arrangement that was never meant to hold.

She describes it as a guideline for people to work hard and not waste time, aimed at getting someone back to a normal living situation as fast as circumstances allow. People can stay past ninety days, and PASS extends in special cases.

The plan itself belongs to the guest. The organization's position is that it does not guess at what someone wants for herself; staff ask, and every plan comes out different. PASS then supplies whatever supportive services it has that fit what the guest has named.

“So it is their own kind of plan. We don't try to guess at what people really want for themselves. We ask them, you know, what is a plan that you want for yourself.”

Carmen Frederic · 6:46

The second step, and why PASS owns the houses

The move out of the emergency shelter starts with income. Once a guest's income is steady and arriving on a regular schedule, PASS can look at its own transitional houses.

The organization bought those properties because the private rental market in Prescott had closed to the people it served. Landlords wanted income at three times the rent, screened out applicants with a felony record, and turned down anyone whose credit score fell below 600. A large share of PASS guests failed at least one of those tests, and case management did not change the paperwork.

Carmen's case for owning the housing is an underwriting argument. After ninety days of daily contact, the organization knows the person well enough to judge whether a tenancy will work, which is more than a credit report tells it. Residents pay some rent. They keep working with staff at a lighter intensity, which the organization's site describes as weekly meetings, and a stay can run from six months up to two years.

A resident leaves with a landlord reference from PASS, which is the document the private market wanted at the start.

“Even though their credit score or their income wasn't three times as much as it should be, we knew them as an individual by 90 days and would know if this person would make it in one of our places where they do pay a little bit of rent.”

Carmen Frederic · 8:37

For guests who find their own place

By Carmen's estimate about half of PASS guests leave through the transitional houses. Others find housing on their own, and some of those need very little; Carmen describes people who had everything else in place and just needed somewhere to land while they saved money.

For guests housing themselves, PASS runs what Carmen calls transition match. She describes it briefly on air: a guest who attends the organization's educational programs and starts saving gets her savings matched toward the cost of moving in. The organization's website carries the mechanics under the name Homeless Transition Project: three months of case management and classes run with partner organizations, then a match of what the guest has saved, up to $1,000 for a family and $500 for an individual, paid directly to the landlord.

Carmen credits transitional housing and transition match together for the organization's success rate. She does not put a number on it in the conversation.

“You don't want to be too full of yourself or come across too businesslike because you're dealing with real human beings that matter.”

Carmen Frederic · 27:43

What actually stops people

Transportation is the barrier Carmen names first, though she stops short of calling it a deal-breaker. A job twelve miles away that someone cannot reach is a job she will probably lose, and the loss compounds from there. Local bus service is thin; the organization's site notes that buses stop at 5pm, which does not cover shift work. PASS raises grant money for its own Wheels to Work program and spends it on bus passes, cab vouchers and gas.

Child care follows a seasonal pattern Carmen says people outside the work do not anticipate. School covers most of the year, and then summer break runs two to three months with nothing to put children into, which takes mothers of young children out of work for that stretch. She traces part of the shortage to COVID, when daycares closed or stopped taking children, and says the supply has been slow to return.

Mental health can work the same way. A guest may start a job well and then decline under the conditions of shelter life, with medication that stops being taken properly, too little sleep and poor food, until holding the job becomes impossible. Carmen's framing is that a condition someone manages elsewhere can come apart when several of the supports around it go at once.

What changed between 2009 and 2017

Carmen was PASS's first executive director in 2009 and led it for about six years before leaving for a personal reason. The organization then struggled to keep a permanent director for more than a year or so at a time, and people there kept asking her back. She returned in 2017.

The market she came back to was harder. Costs had risen, and jobs were available without paying close to three times the rent. Housing prices in the area had climbed sharply, and units that had been priced against a tenant's income converted to full market rate. Carmen's example is a senior in federally subsidized housing whose rent had been calculated from what she earned, now facing a flat $1,200 a month on an income of $800 to $1,200.

That showed up in who arrived at the shelter. PASS saw an increase in guests aged 60 and over, women in retirement who had been housed for years until the subsidy on the unit disappeared. Carmen's wider observation is that working families are strained too, and that covering a household now takes two or three earners.

Running it, and advising someone else to build it

Carmen is in the office Monday through Friday and comes back Thursdays from five to eight to spend time with the women in the shelter. She does not announce herself as the director. The case manager owns the goal work and knows each guest's situation in detail; the Thursday evening is Carmen's way of knowing faces and keeping a direct line to the program.

The rest of the week is administration in the broad sense: phone screenings she hands to the case manager, volunteers, donors, email, committees in town. She sits on the board of a new nonprofit forming in Prescott Valley, the neighboring town, where more people are living in cars and tents. She also mentions plunging a shelter toilet ten minutes after working on something significant for the organization.

Her advice to a director who wants to build the same second step starts one level up, with the state of the organization. Be stable before expanding. Have a board that takes the fiduciary side seriously, because the money is donated and granted and should not be spent testing whether an idea works. Start with one property and give it a go; PASS did, and looked at a second only after confirming both the finances and the demand.

She closes on the two modes the work requires. An organization like hers has to sustain itself financially and also has to meet people well, and her warning is against carrying the business posture into the room where the service happens.