Petaluma’s SHARE program expands to help evacuees find shelter

Hundreds of locals open their homes to those displaced by the fire|

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.”

Additionally, she said that Target, along with the Petaluma Mother’s Club, have been offering gift cards for those in the SHARE program, should they need a new pillow, or something else to help ease the transition into a stranger’s home.

The transition goes both ways, of course. Hempel said it’s no small thing for someone to invite total strangers into their homes.

“We do have a simple two-page contract, for people asking for temporary shelter,” Hempel said. “Mainly asking you to agree to honor the ‘people side’ of this arrangement, that you will be responsible for cleaning up after yourself, that sort of thing.”

In the current emergency, with so many waiting to be allowed back into evacuation areas, Hempel said that the vast majority of SHARE’s new clients only require temporary housing. She said some participants have already been placed in a home, only to say goodbye after a day or two, when their evacuation area is reopened. Others, especially those who have no home to return to, may end up being with their SHARE home-provider for much longer.

For a program that did not exist in this form two weeks ago, Hempel said the SHARE program has proven to be a remarkable success.

“We have gotten calls from all over the United States,” she said. “Someone from Minnesota called to say, ‘We know this is a long shot, but we have an extra place here, and if someone wants to come out to Minnesota, they can have it.”

SHARE has received offers of spare rooms, apartments, and houses from as far as Austin Texas, Sacramento and Eureka, and as near as San Rafael, San Francisco and Oakland.

“The amount of paper we are going through is astonishing,” she said. “Over the last week, we have spent our paper budget for the rest of the year.”

She said that those wishing to help replenish PPS’s paper supply should not drop off boxes of paper. A check specified for paper purchases would be simpler.

“Our volunteers have done an amazing job,” Hempel said. “I also want the world to know that my staff is here still doing their day jobs, still working to put low-income seniors into affordable housing.”

According to Larry Jonas, who is hosting the Hulces while they await word on the condition of their house, he and his fiancée were in Oregon when news of the fires broke.

They immediately returned to Petaluma and began volunteering at local evacuation centers.

“Then we got a notice from our rabbi, asking for people to consider opening their homes to evacuees,” Jonas said. “I have to admit, the whole thing had left me depressed, but when you start helping people, you really do feel better. I feels so blessed to be able to help out people in such need.”

(Contact David at david.templeton@arguscourier.com)

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