Friendship Shelter

Friendship Shelter helps homeless adults achieve self-sufficiency and become more productive members of our community.  Our organizational vision is to end homelessness in southern Orange County, one person at a time. 

Founded in 1988 by a group of concerned citizens in Laguna Beach, from the very beginning Friendship Shelter focused on the most vulnerable among southern Orange County’s homeless population. Throughout the ensuing years, our mission continued as our organization evolved into a model for ending homelessness through housing solutions and an advocate for the homeless population.

Friendship Shelter's programs are each focused on ending homelessness through housing, particularly for the most vulnerable, high-need populations. We provide uniquely comprehensive, individualized assistance based on each client’s circumstance, needs, and capacity in our three core programs: emergency shelter, bridge housing, and permanent supportive housing. The goal always is to help individuals find and sustain appropriate permanent housing (including rooms and apartments for rent, family reunification, and housing with wraparound supportive services).

As the largest shelter and supportive housing operator in southern Orange County – serving more than 220 individuals each night – we challenge ourselves to keep entry thresholds low and focus services on finding the best housing solution for each guest. We continually work to ensure that all programs employ evidence-based best practices and our housing solutions are increasingly developed in collaboration with diverse corporate, government, and non-profit partners.

Guided by our vision to end homelessness, we aim to lead southern Orange County's regional efforts by providing effective housing‐focused services with integrity and transparency, advocating for best‐practice solutions, and by collaborating with diverse stakeholders.

Accomplishments:

• Our greatest recent accomplishment was the success we achieved together with our partners in reducing homelessness in southern Orange County. According to the most recent (February 2022) Point-in-Time count, homelessness decreased by 23% in southern Orange County since 2019 and unsheltered homelessness decreased by more than 60% in Laguna Beach (where our Housing Focused Shelter Program and our Street Outreach program are based).

• Overall, 115 Friendship Shelter clients ended their homelessness through permanent housing in 2021.

• We have grown our Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) program by nearly 35% totaling 163 clients with disabilities who are safely and permanently housed in the program today. In 2021, 97% of those served by the program stayed safely housed. In addition, 63% of those clients increased their income. We attribute this success to the ongoing support of Friendship Shelter’s specialized case management team and their dedication to a “whatever it takes” approach to housing stability.

Goals:

• Friendship Shelter’s programmatic goal for 2022 is to end the homelessness of 120 or more individuals in southern Orange County.

• In order to realize our vision of ending homelessness in southern Orange County, we must continually engage in bold strategic efforts. In May 2022, we adopted a new 3-year strategic plan that builds on our recent successes of program expansion, system-level leadership, and strengthened infrastructure. In addition to these core objectives, we have added an emphasis on prioritizing equity & justice issues (racial/ethnic/gender/identity/disability) as well as smart program growth that maintains financial health and employee well-being.

• Unrestricted funding is our number one need. 89 cents of every dollar spent at Friendship Shelter goes directly to program. We are especially in need of funding to support our goal of increasing the supply of vitally needed permanent supportive housing units in southern O.C. and to fill funding gaps in staffing, rental assistance & essential furnishings for low-income clients.

• Landlords willing to rent to formerly homeless tenants are essential and vitally needed partners. Many clients struggle to find landlords who will rent to them due to spotty rental/employment history or refusal to accept government housing vouchers.

• Willing employers are another key ingredient in our clients’ success. We need employers willing to work with clients who may have spotty work histories and/or legal challenges such as prior convictions. We support clients in their re-entry to the work world and our employment partners have found them to be grateful, valuable staffers.

Friendship Shelter serves all of southern Orange County.

From our inception 33 years ago, Friendship Shelter has been a values-driven organization that responds to community need. Throughout that time, we have focused on learning, have remained open to new approaches, and have continuously transformed to improve outcomes and address emerging needs. Setting us apart is a focus on program effectiveness rather than on compelling clients to fit a pre-conceived idea of success.

Like many homeless serving organizations, we spent decades providing services designed to help the client change so that they could be ready for housing. We had significant success, but once we began serving chronically homeless individuals at our emergency shelter in 2009, we realized there was another, much more vulnerable population that could not access our existing programs. We realized our carefully built system of care unintentionally created barriers to those who needed help the most.

For the first time in our history, we stopped asking how the client needed to change and started asking how our organization needed to change to help the most vulnerable individuals we were meeting. We visited successful programs in other communities. We attended regional and national conferences. We affirmed, within our planning process, both a goal of housing the most vulnerable and a willingness to examine current programs and try new strategies.

The result: We’ve aligned all Friendship Shelter programs to focus on placing each client in the most appropriate housing solution as swiftly as possible, with voluntary wraparound services for those that need and desire additional support. We work exclusively with homeless adults – and we acknowledge particular expertise in working with people who have mental health and/or substance abuse challenges.

Going forward, we have a responsibility – as one of the region's oldest and most respected human services organizations – to continually improve our organization and its ability to respond to the community that has brought us so far, and to our clients and unhoused neighbors who have inspired us in our endeavors.