A Home to Come Home To

It seems like a simple thing, a simple need - a place to come home to where we can let our hair down, take our shoes off, put our feet up, rest, and eat a good meal. Everyone should have a "home to come home to". After a long day of meetings, shopping or traveling, nothing appeals more than coming home to rest.

A "home to come home to"is what our unsheltered friends need. Yet, they have no place they can call home - no place to rest safely. No place to be warm and dry out of the weather. As the generous community we are in Nevada City and Grass Valley, can we come together to provide a place like this for each of our citizens? What will it take?

Right now we have Hospitality House Community Shelter as an overnight emergency shelter which is doing a tremendous job of finding housing for so many un-housed individuals. It is one solution for many people. But if you have animals, you can't come in. If you've had something to drink during the day, you can't come in. If you have severe anxiety or post traumatic syndrome, you won't want to stay there with so many people all around you. It's not the place for many of our chronically house-less individuals who have taken care of themselves for months and years very resourcefully.

Divine Spark has rented a day center called the Streicher House that is open from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. This is a quiet and serene place for house-less individuals to spend the day, eat a good meal, shower, get some clean clothes or connect with Social Service providers. But there is no home to go home to after 4:00 p.m..

The County is providing money to buy land to possibly build an apartment building for low income people in Grass Valley very soon - maybe it will be done in 2017- 2018? They also have secured money and contractors to renovate the Bost House in Nevada City as a rehab and mental health facility for Veterans and homeless individuals. Bost House is scheduled to be open by the middle of 2017.

The consciousness of the community has been raised as to the very difficult situation for a growing number of people in our community who call this area their home, but don't have the money or resources to rent an apartment or buy a home here. Individuals, county and city officials are addressing the homelessness situation as fast as they can and all are doing their best. Yet we still have no immediate place for those unsheltered and very dangerously fragile to live out of the cold and the wet this winter.

Sierra Roots appreciates and acknowledges all the efforts of the cities and county to address this growing crisis. However, all of it is in the future. Some still want to do more research about the homeless. Meetings abound. Continuum of Care continues to work ceaselessly to count and get numbers of homeless persons and rank them in the needs categories. Much is being done and people are still not housed or safe.

Those who suffer any mental instability due to being unsheltered and marginalized from the mainstream community, are in desperate need of privacy, a quiet place to go home to, as well as a caring community that will help them navigate the many streams of services the agencies provide.

Each individual needs individual love and assistance. Each individual

needs a serious friend who will commit to helping them and seeing it through with them, whether for days, weeks, months or years - someone who will not give up on them. That's why Sierra Roots is training Advocates to do that for individuals.

We continue moving towards setting up a small home village as a supportive community for these very needy and fragile people who are chronically homeless.

Sierra Roots has studied this situation and been embedded with the chronically homeless people of our community for the last five years. We have done the research and know what can and does work for these individuals who are so needy of community and housing. We are ready to step in and do this NOW for our community.

We just need a good piece of land on which to begin to set up our village. Help us get the finances we need to purchase a piece of land, since neither the county nor the cities are ready to lease us a piece of land to do this. We can create a community and we can do this with the homeless community to create a beautiful, self-sustaining and self-managed community of health, safety, security and beauty for all residents.

Sierra Roots is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization registered with the Internal Revenue Service/Department of the Treasury. Therefore, all donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law. All donors receive an acknowledgment that includes a confirmation of their donation for their tax records.

Learn more about Sierra Roots at www.SierraRoots.org.

Your donation today will make the acquisition of the land to build a sustainable supportive community for those most in need of "A Home to Come Home To." Call Janice O'Brien at (530)265-5403 or Sierra Roots at (530)264-5113