Petaluma’s SHARE program expands to help evacuees find shelter
Compared to the wooden pew Ron and Randi Hulce slept on the first night of their evacuation, the cots brought in two nights later at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Sebastopol, must have seemed like heaven. Which makes the spare room at Larry Jonas and Eileen Kaplan’s Petaluma house, where they’ve been staying since Monday night, a measurable improvement on Heaven.
And that, to the Hulces, is nothing less than miraculous.
“The people at St. Stephen’s were just wonderful,” said Randi Hulce, describing her and Ron’s home for the first week after evacuating from the massive wildfires. “They made us very comfortable, and were so loving and caring and concerned. We felt very taken care of.”
Like so many others around Sonoma and Napa Counties, the Hulces were sent fleeing from their Oakmont homes in the early hours of Monday morning, Oct. 9. They brought their small dog with them, and almost nothing else. After a week of waiting and wondering, the Hulces learned about the SHARE Sonoma County program, offered by Petaluma People Services Center.
“I saw a notice, put out by the Jewish Community Center, saying, ‘If you need a place to stay, check out SHARE,’” Hulce said. “I didn’t know what it was at first. Then, at the church there was a handout being passed around about SHARE, so I gave them a call and talked to them, and within a couple of days, they found a place for us in a beautiful home in Petaluma.”
Even their dog is happy with the arrangement.
“It’s so ideal,” Hulce said. “We needed a place without a lot of stairs, and Larry and Eileen’s place is perfect. They have a very friendly dog, and our dogs were playing together within minutes, which was very important to us. Last night was the first night we’ve slept on a real bed. We have our own bedroom and bath. It couldn’t be nicer.”
The SHARE program was originally developed to assist low income seniors in finding homes around Sonoma County. It was not originally designed as a service for people evacuated and homeless during large scale disasters. That all changed on the first morning of the fires.
“When the fire hit, we got a call from the county asking if we could adapt the SHARE program and make it usable for fire victims,” said Elece Hempel, executive director of Petaluma People Service Center, adding that once PPSC put the word out, asking for people to open their homes to those displaced by the fires, the response was immediate. “In a typical Northern Californian way, we have already had over 600 people call up to say they are willing to share their home, to move their kids out of their bedrooms, even to move to a second house they own and let people use their main home. It’s been an amazing outpouring of generosity.”
The SHARE program is headed by Amy Appleton, who started a similar home-sharing program at Committee on the Shelterless before helping to launch SHARE through the PPSC in the summer of 2014. According to Hempel, the transition from a small senior home-sharing operation into a vast emergency service was literally an overnight transformation.
“There was a steep learning curve of just a day or two,” Hempel said, remarking that SHARE’s rapidly expanding team of volunteers were initially swamped with residence-seekers, looking for people willing to open their homes. “It has been a bit overwhelming for our team, who’ve had to learn a lot of things they never thought they’d need to know, like how to ask someone seeking shelter the address of their former home. That can be a very traumatic moment for people, and we’re learning that a simple question like that can carry huge emotional weight.”
Finding a match is much more than simply putting random people together, she said.
“We are first finding out if there’s a cat allergy in play,” she said. “Or maybe cannabis use or something - anything one of the parties does or has that the other party might not be able to tolerate. We had one woman looking for space, and she has a pet rabbit and some kind of lizard thing. So we are working to find the right match for all of them.”
One part of the process is to run background checks on the home-seeker, a step put in place to give home-providers another measure of comfort and safety. After the match is made and the displaced people are safely moved in, SHARE then sets up volunteers to help in coordinating rides to the DMV and unemployment offices, assisting with necessary paperwork and other tasks.
“Our volunteer coordinators are the point persons for all of that,” Hempel said. “We’re really working hard to get everyone the kind of guidance and support they need.”
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