A new vision for emergency shelter services

“Today we issue a challenge to ourselves, our peers, and our community. We can create temporary and long-term housing that is human-centric. We can reduce the capacity of large scale shelters to provide a greater degree of more qualitative and individualized service, while simultaneously exploring creative mechanisms to site and fund new facilities within our community. We must ensure that the hard lessons we learn today are not learned in vain, so that our neighbors living on the street, in our shelters, and those fortunate enough to be placed in hotels, have access to the same level of safety and security going forward that much of the rest of us take for granted. Simply put, we can and we must do better.”

Read ECS Executive Director Beth Stokes’ full SF Examiner op-ed.