Transformational Trauma and Healing: Providing Homeless Families with Dignity and Agency

Join me in this amazing conversation with Brandi Tuck, Executive Director of Path-Home, a  family homeless shelter created with trauma-informed design and architecture. Explore with us how the shelter design helps families get out of the fight, flight, or freeze trauma response by providing safety, care, and support with the goal of helping the families find and maintain permanent housing.

To learn more, see this article in The Guardian. 

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Transcript

6:12 - Carrie Rickert Hi Brandi, how are you? Thank you so much for joining us today.

6:22 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Thank you for having me.

6:26 - Carrie Rickert I am so excited to have you on the podcast, I'd like to kind of start well 1st I'd like to say that, you know, I found out about you and Path home. A friend of mine sent me a news article from I think it was Apple News. And I will put that in the in the call notes so that people can accesss the article too. But she had sent it to me and she was like, I think this would be such a great podcast episode and when I read the article, I was absolutely, yes, like, oh, you know me so well, so Um, so as you know, this podcast is about, trauma and healing and um, as I just introduced you, you uh, work, the homeless, which is certainly a trauma and we'll get to that in a few minutes.

7:31 - Carrie Rickert But I'd like to start out with what path home is.

7:37 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Sure, yeah. Path Home is a nonprofit whose mission is to empower homeless families with children to get back into housing and stay there. We have programs that support families from crisis to stability. We have an outreach programm where we work with families who are literally outside, sleeping in cars or tents or on the streets. We engage them and bring them into Main Street service, mainstream services. We have an emergency shelter for up to 17 families with children. It's the 1st shelter in Oregon that features trauma informed design and architecture, and we can talk all about that.

8:16 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) We have a rapid rehousing programm where families, we help families move from homeless back into housing and we provide long term case management support to help families keep that housing we have a homeless prevention programm where we prevent homelessness and the crisis and trauma that is homelessness for families before homelessness ever even starts and we have our most upstream program is our basic income guarantee worldwide research shows that the fastest and most efficient way to end homelessness for people and to end poverty is by giving people cash and letting them manage their households with it last year we served five hundred and twenty four families about two thousand kids and parents.

9:01 - Carrie Rickert Wow. Wow, that is so many, you know, you, you don't really, unless you are confronted with it, I don't think you really. Have any idea how many homeless families there are in the world, in this country, How did this become your journey? You founded this organization so and you were pretty young when you founded it and you were obviously still young but you were twenty four when you founded it so tell tell us a little bit about that what what led you to this.

9:46 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) In college. I'm from Florida originally and um, I went to the University of Florida and I went there thinking that I was gonna be an attorney. I did pre law and, you know, had an internship at the courthouse and was on the mock trial team and really was thinking I was going to go to law school.

10:02 - Carrie Rickert You.

10:02 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) I was very involved on campus and lots of different leadership activities and community service. And one spring break, my friends who are also very involved on campus, they were all going on this community service spring break trip and I was like, nobody is gonna go to the beach with me. Like, what you all are doing. Certain I was like, well, if I don't, I'm not gonna go home. I don't want to go to my parents house for spring break. I'm a junior in college, so I guess I'll sign up for one of these trips too.

10:35 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) And at the time I didn't have any passion for any, you know, particular issue. There were eleven different issue areas that you could choose from for trips. And it was things like Hiv and Aids, animal rights, the environment, education, women's rights, and homelessness and poverty, and none of them spoke to me. So I just kind of was like, Well, I don't wanna like touch dirty things like clean up trash or something like that, and I don't wanna do medical stuff. So I guesss I'll sign up for the homelessness and poverty trip.

11:08 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) So I went to Atlanta, Georgia, with a group of twelve other students, and we volunteered around at a few different Atlanta shelters and soup kitchens and things like that. And that trip completely changed my life. And I found out that I have this huge passion for working with people experiencing homelessness. So from that point forward, I, I went back to school and decided to just rededicate pretty much everything I did to working with people without homes. And I thought I would still go to law school.

11:38 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) But then I had an internship at a law firm and I hated it. And so I said, you know what, I'm not gonna go to law school. And instead I moved out here to portland right after college kind of on a whim um I had mo come out here for a little vacation and was supposed to go to washington dc for a job and moved out here instead you know kind of last minute and started volunteering at this little shelter called the goose hollow family shelter that was a temporary shelter during the winter months only for eight homeless families with children and I was pretty much that's you know on friday night saturday night I was at the shelter working with these families and kids doing kid time activities staying overnight with the families doing dinners and breakfasts and two years in to my volunteer work when I was just twenty four they are executive director of this little shelter that was not yet a nonprofit she left and I said oh my gosh this is my dream job I want to work at this you know I wanna be the executive director of this little shelter but I never thought they would give it to me because I was so young and then they did and so a year after th that we created Path Home, the nonprofit, to take over operation of Goose Hollow so that we could expand and serve more people and improve our services.

12:56 - Carrie Rickert awesome. Does the funding for Path Home come from Because read in your, in the bio that you know you have a huge budget, how Eight person or eight family shelter How did you get to this?

13:21 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) when I started our operating budget was seventy eight thousand dollars a year back in two thousand seven and today it's about five million dollars a year so we get half of our funding from local city and county government resources and the other half of our funding about two and a half million dollars a year comes from individual donations and foundation grants and the anywhere from you know a five dollar donation up to a hundred thousand dollar donation from people and everything in between so it's really the generosity of the community that supports our work and makes it possible.

13:30 - Carrie Rickert That's. That's awesome. I love that since this is a podcast about trauma. And I really don't think that most people realize they really just one catastrophic event away from homelessness. I know for, for me, I was in a, a car accident ten years ago and had a, as a result, had a traumatic brain injury and um, had I not had the family support, had my accident not been a worker's compensation case? I could have very easily ended up as a single mother of two children. Homeless and um, you know, even with insurance, those hospital bills were insane.

14:54 - Carrie Rickert I'd like to explore with you how homelessness is traumatic and, and why shelters matter and how yours is different.

15:05 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) So I'm gonna, if it's okay, I'm gonna do a little bit of brain science here for a quick.

15:09 - Carrie Rickert Go ahead, please.

15:11 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) anyone's brain, your brain, my brain, anyone's brain experiences stress. Our brains release chemicals that help us get through that stress and if it's positive, motivating stress, like finals week at school or starting a new job or maybe moving to a new home, your brain releases chemicals that promote emotional regulation, critical thinking, logical thought. Maybe you can remember a time when you were giving a presentation at school or at work and you were super duper nervous about it, but then you get up there and you just nail it and you're like, wow, like I just did so good, That's your brain chemicals, releasing chemicals into your, into your system so that you can excel.

15:55 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) And then there's another kind of stress, negative stress or distress, and this is released in our brain whenever we are confronted with something that's really dangerous, that could potentially, you know, kill us, that we think it could end our lives. And so this, kind of stress response actually turns off your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's responsible for things like critical thinking, logic, speech and language understanding, telling time, all of those things so that you can go into fight, flight, or freeze survival mode.

16:30 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) And this is really helpful, like when a lion is running at you in the wild, or you may be heard of like the super human strength to lift the car off of the kid who is underneath it, and that's your brain. Chemicals giving you that power Well, it turns out that that same distress chemical reaction occurs when you experience homelessness. And when you experience homelessness for days, weeks, months, or years, your brain stays in that chemical response the whole time. So you don't have access to your critical thinking, logical brain and you are stuck in fight, flight or tree freeze.

17:14 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) And over time that turns into a trauma where the brain starts to think that it's always supposed to be in fight, fighter, freeze, always looking for the danger, thinking that there is a dangerous wild animal running at you and that your life is in danger. And so that's how homelessness is a trauma. And when we, have so, so anytime someone is experiencing homelessness, we can think about their brain just being in fight fighter freeze mode. So when we expect people to be able follow shelter rules or or hear shelter rules and understand them we know that their brains can't do that because they say that when you're in a traumatic response when you're in that fight flight or freeze trauma mode you can only hear every third word that's said to you and so when someone is talking to you it's just like jumbled nonsense you don't know what people are saying you can't make a shelter curfew a shelter curfew it was eight pm you don't know your brain doesn't know how to tell time and so you might it might get to eight o'clock pm ohh shoot the shelter currey was eight o'clock but you're forty five minutes away on public transit from the shelter but your brain logically can't do that calculation of i've got to get on the bus forty five minutes before curfew so that I can make curfew And so a lot of times our traditional homeless shelters are really kind of chaotic,

18:17 - Carrie Rickert Okay.

18:41 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) messy places that just exacerbate this. Trauma response and make it even worse. And then we have these rules and, and requirements of people to be in shelters that they are just not physically capable of being able to follow because of the, the reaction in their brain.

19:02 - Carrie Rickert They don't have the capacity. Because of that trauma response to follow the rules and um. Be able to make good decisions to help themselves. They, they just can't,

19:19 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) That's right, that's right. And maybe, you know,

19:21 - Carrie Rickert okay,

19:21 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) like we maybe have all felt that awesomeness when we're giving a presentation. We probably also felt times when we've been in a distress response and maybe yelled at our kids or our partner or or done something that's really irrational and we're like, Why did I do that? Well, it's because you were in a distressed response, right? We all experienced distressed responses, but it's this prolonged. Distress response that turns into this trauma.

19:50 - Carrie Rickert Well and, and I think, you know, as I typically think of a homeless shelter and I don't have a huge amount of experience with that, but is, you think of kind of like a dingy Dirk Place with a bunch of cards and people just sharing space and, and in itself may not be safe and can contribute, I would imagine, to that fear response and the the trauma response.

20:25 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Absolutely it really does and for you know i've been at path home now for sixteen years as executive director and we used to run shelters exactly like that where we'd have seventy five cots in a warehouse with no windows and concrete floors and you know exposed pipes in the ceiling we'd have only two bathrooms with no showers for seventy five kids and parents and it was all just in this one big room and so think about as a parent sleeping in a room with 70 other people that you don't know and how, how scary that is for your kids and for you.

21:02 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) And you know, it's hard to sleep at night thinking like, I don't know these people, I don't know what these people are gonna Absolutely,

21:07 - Carrie Rickert they could. There could be a predator here and

21:10 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Yeah, and and often shelters are really messy and chaotic and there's you know, bedding stacked up and food stacked up and they're just, they're, they're places that make that trauma stress response even worse.

21:24 - Carrie Rickert Okay, so how's Path Home different?

21:29 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) in about two thousand nineteen we learned about trauma informed design and architecture and so before that I guess I'll back up really quickly and so for over a decade we've been doing trauma informed care work with the families that we serve and that we're understanding what's going on in the brain of someone that's experiencing homelessness and we're creating conditions that promote physical psychological and emotional safety so that the people can get out of that trauma response get back into their critical thinking logical brain and be able to do things like follow the shelter rules get a job and keep a job the kids can go to school and actually learn and participate in their education and so then in two thousand nineteen we bought a new building we bought a new shelter that we um had this really amazing opportunity to double the number of families that we could serve in shelter we went from eight to seventeen families and shelter in this new building and around that time one of our donors said oh I know this designer who can come help you design the new shelter and I thought she was gonna tell us like what colors to paint the walls and where to put the couch and that is not what she did we she researched trauma informed design and architecture and gave us eight hundred pro bono hours from jessica helgerson interior design to create this built environment that is trauma informed so we still have our relationships based trauma informed care work that we do but now our built environment the walls and the ceilings and how the building is put together also has an effect on the brain to calm people out of that trauma response and get them back into that critical thinking logical part of their brain And so some of the features of trauma informed design and architecture,

22:00 - Carrie Rickert Okay. May.

23:29 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) they're also really meant to promote physical, psychological, and emotional safety. And so one of the biggest features is it's a real connection to nature. We have natural materials, not like stone and wood, we have natural light everywhere. We blew out a whole bunch of walls. And put in these huge wall size windows. It's about real plants indoors and outdoors. We have huge gardens, like an acre of garden around the shelter, and every room has real plants. When families move into the shelter to stay, they get a house plant for their room.

24:05 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Every family has an individual private bedroom with a door that locks, so they have that sense of security.

24:11 - Carrie Rickert That's huge.

24:12 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) It's huge. Yeah, they have real beds, bunk beds that are kind of like college dorm style bunk beds and they have, you know, this connection to nature. All the rooms have windows and real plants in them. Our color palette is that of the ocean, so it's kind of, it's uh, light greens, the sage greens, and very little color contrast. Black and white are the highest color contrast and we have very little color contrast,

24:37 - Carrie Rickert Okay.

24:43 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) so it's like white to light green to slightly darker green. A slightly darker green, but all really soothing and calming. The only contrasting color that we have is a soft terracotta. That's kind of like the, the sunset if you will. So we have multiple murals around the shelter that B, that our nature scenes. We have a coastal nature scene and an abstract sunset over the ocean. Big, huge mural. The trauma from design is also about really flexible spaces that can be used in many different ways.

25:19 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) It's about giving the people who are there choice and power over how they use the space. So if they want to drag Yes,

25:26 - Carrie Rickert Okay, so they have some agency.

25:29 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) exactly, agency. And so if they want to drag the, the couches and the chairs and set it up in a certain way, they can. It's about there's these ratios of spaciousness to crowdedness and we always have spaciousness. There are everything at, at our family. Village shelter. Like printers and paper and and all that kind of stuff are behind cabinets. So it's lots of clean lines and smooth surfaces. Because when you are in a trauma response and there's all kinds of posters and fliers and signs and betting and things just everywhere, your brain it activates that fight, flight or freeze response and you start counting or looking or looking at the colors and finding all the reds or finding all the yellows and it just keeps our brain in this over active searching for where the danger is coming from Next kind of of mode all of our doors at Family Village except the family bedrooms.

26:30 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) They're solid wood doors, but all the rest of the doors to every room are glass doors so you can see through them. So families get to make an educated choice about do I wanna go into that room? I can look and see. Oh, there is another family in there that I don't really get along with, so I'm not gonna go in there right now, I'm gonna go somewhere else.

26:50 - Carrie Rickert Okay.

26:50 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) It's really about building dignity. So we have really fancy stuff. We have really high end light fixtures and plumbing fixtures. I mean really fancy stuff that was mostly all donated to us by these amazing businesses.

27:02 - Carrie Rickert That's so wonderful.

27:04 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) it's about promoting autonomy so families you know can be there twenty four hours a day they can go anywhere in the shelter they want twenty four hours a day it's about uh like I said promoting choice and giving power rebuilding power when your brain is in a trauma response and you think that you're in danger twenty four hours a day that strips your power away and you feel like you have no power the world is very scary and confusing you don't you don't have logic or critical thinking available so everything is confusing and it makes you feel really small and really invisible and so we want to make people feel like they are worthy that they have dignity and that we We are giving them the power.

27:51 - Carrie Rickert I love that so much. Because I think that, you know, in working with trauma survivors, I, I know absolutely that feel they have value dignity, will do so much better than someone who, as you said, feels small and feels that they aren't valuable. And I, I absolutely believe that Environment. Has a lot to do with how you feel about that. So like it is bad enough, right, that, that you might be experiencing homelessness with your children and then going into a Dirk Ding shelter.

28:49 - Carrie Rickert Frightening and makes you feel small. Coming into your shelter, it sounds like it almost feels like a vacation, you know, I mean obviously it isn't right. The, they're there. For circumstances that nobody wants but Knowing that they're coming into something that is healthy and clean provides that dignity must be so soothing to the soul.

29:27 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Absolutely, the families that come in, they tell us that they feel calm,

29:30 - Carrie Rickert They're already experiencing such hardship.

29:32 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) they feel peaceful, they feel hopeful for the future, and most importantly, they tell us this place makes me feel like you care about me and that's exactly what we're going for. I think the kids love it and what there was, you know, it's summer time right now and so a lot of the kids are out of school.

29:49 - Carrie Rickert Oh, love that.

29:50 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) The kids are out of school. The staff really does a great job of having activities and all kinds of, you know, Stem activities and coloring and crafts. Then games and relay races, and all kinds of stuff, and there was one little boy who was about eight or nine years old, who said the other day, Gosh, it's good to be a kid. And to have a little boy have that kind of reaction.

30:24 - Carrie Rickert Have a homeless child feel that way.

30:27 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) I mean,

30:27 - Carrie Rickert Wow.

30:28 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) it's, it's so powerful and that is the environment that we have at Family Village.

30:34 - Carrie Rickert Oh, that's wonderful.

30:34 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) One of my favorite stories about one of the families that stayed with us last winter is, it was a, a dad and a mom who had a 13 year old. The dad is a mechanic and he, you know, was working full time. 70 % of the families that stay in shelter are working while they stay in shelter. They just don't make enough money to a housing, right, because housing is very expensive. And so he, they were staying in shelter, he didn't know they'd never been in shelter before, they didn't know if they were really gonna be able to come, but when they came to Family village and saw the place, they were like, Wait what this is the shelter, like I get to stay here.

31:14 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Okay, I'll do this. They were only in shelter for about a month and we helped them move back into permanent housing.

31:21 - Carrie Rickert Oh, that's wonderful.

31:22 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Three or four months after they moved out of shelter, the mom called me and said, Hey, after all these years, we've decided that we are gonna get married. They were not married at the time, unmarried and she called and said, we have a place we can get married, but when we think about the places that are most special to us and that are the most beautiful places for a great background, for pictures, we thought of the shelter, could we come get married at Family Village shelter? So we let them.

31:53 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) We had a wedding.

31:54 - Carrie Rickert Oh, oh, wonderful. Wow, wow. Like that says that story says so much about you are doing to provide people loving care and a home. A crisis. You mentioned some of the services and you know, summer with kids and activities and things like that. Tell talk to us a little more about A family comes in and is staying in shelter. What happens?

32:38 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) So when a family comes in, the 1st thing that we do is we just want to make them feel really comfortable. Family Village has all kinds of community spaces. We have a library and a computer lab and a kids play area and a big kitchen and dining room where we do three meals a day for families. We also have a huge playground and a basketball court and a pickle ball court and a flour square thing and a covered picnic area.

33:00 - Carrie Rickert a nice.

33:04 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) We have a huge vegetable garden, so the families, the 1st thing we do is just give the families about a week to come in. And stabilize and realize okay these people care about me this is a safe space and I can settle and and let this you know trauma informed design work on my brain to help me calm out of this stress response and then we work with each of the families to help them address whatever's going on in their lives so we can get them quickly back into housing our average length of stay in shelter is only about three months families stay with us for three months and we help them move back into housing last year ninety six percent of the families that stayed in shelter moved back into permanent housing so it's almost every single family moves through the shelter and back into their own home and the way we do that.

33:34 - Carrie Rickert Okay, wow. Wow, and and only in three months, like that's, I would say, I'm guessing here, but traditional shelters, that's probably not the case.

34:08 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) That's right, a lot of shelter is just we. House people for many, many, many months, sometimes even years. People are staying in these shelters and they're staying in this trauma response and they're not able to get into housing. So we, we use this evidence based practice called rapid rehousing or Housing 1st, where we want to minimize the time that someone is in experiencing homelessness so that we minimize the amount of time that they're in that trauma response. We do that by working with housing specialist case managers who have relationships with landlords all over the community to help families move quickly back into homes.

34:47 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Then we provide rent assistance to those families to help them stabilize and then we work on everything that's going on in the family's life once they're in housing and their brains have calmed out of this trauma response. Then we work on things like mental healthcare, domestic violence advocacy. We do employment training, budgeting and financial training, parenting class. And we try to get the families to a space where they can afford their rent. Ongoing We sometimes we, you know, we really tailor the services to each of the families for whatever they say that they need.

35:25 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) So every family gets something a little bit different because every family is a little bit different.

35:30 - Carrie Rickert Great. Right? So, so you don't. Even so, the majority of your services pass the shelter. Start happening after they have been re homed. So it isn't like here you are for three months now we're shoving you out and bye, good luck. And because that, you know, I and I, I think about this a lot with, with health care kinds of things too. Especially mental health care. You know, we have systems that cause recurrence of the same thing because we're not giving people the support on the other side.

36:18 - Carrie Rickert Not only are you helping people get into new homes, but you are supporting them a length of time after that to ensure they can stay there.

36:32 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) that's right yeah exactly and as a result of that work eighty seven percent of the families that we serve keep their housing long term.

36:41 - Carrie Rickert Wow. That's amazing. That is amazing. And so I'm in Maryland. I'm like, Why isn't there anything like this here?

36:55 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) You know, and we really want to be a national model where we want other organizations and other shelters to really adopt this kind of work. And we're happy to work with organizations to help them learn about trauma informed care and trauma informed design and point them in the right direction. So that, you know, the solution to homelessness is not shelter, it's not camping, it's not mass encampments or tiny houses, it's helping people move back into housing and giving them the dignity and the support that they need to keep that housing forever.

37:28 - Carrie Rickert It's, it's allowing people to. Become independent again,

37:37 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) That's right.

37:37 - Carrie Rickert you know, like we have a, to me, what you're saying is we have faith in you. This is a hard time. And we have faith in you that you can find a home and do all the things that need to be done in orderer to maintain that home. And we're gonna help support you in that you have value and we care.

38:04 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) That's exactly right.

38:07 - Carrie Rickert Shouldn't that just be the model?

38:10 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) I think so. Hey.

38:13 - Carrie Rickert Absolutely, Oh my goodness. So tell me how our listeners can help. So I'm assuming, you know, like imagine that people from all across the country listen to this podcast. We're not in Oregon. How can we help? Not only you and your organization thrive, but how can we make a difference? Organizations in our own States and communities.

38:46 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) You know, I think there are so many things that people can do. One of the things is that you can work with your own communities to really push for solutions that work. You can help make sure that whenever there are dollars and you know from city government and, and county governments and state governments that they're being utilized for rapid rehousing and helping people that are experiencing homelessness move back into housing. There are so many dollars that are being prioritized for emergency services.

39:15 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) And it's like if you have a broken arm and you go to the emergency room and they give you a band aid for that broken arm, it's not going to help you, right? It's not going to repair your arm. And that's the same for a shelter. A shelter is not going to repair the situation of homelessness that you're in. Shelters can be very great places. We love our shelter. We're so proud of our shelter. It, we know that it transforms lives and it's only half of the equation. The permanent housing is the real solution.

39:44 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) So advocate for permanent housing. Ask your elected officials when decisions are being made and funding is being distributed. How much fund, how much housing will this funding create? How quickly will people be moved into that housing, and what supports will people be given to be able to stay in that housing? So that can happen anywhere. You can also advocate for trauma informed design. And this isn't just for shelters, right? We can use trauma informed mine everywhere. We can use it in our homes, in our doctor's offices, in our schools, in our homeless shelters, everywhere.

40:22 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) A lot of the research that we used for trauma informed design has been done the thousand nine hundred sixty on hospitals and what of hospital spaces promote longer hospital stays in occurrences of infection and repeat visits to the hospital versus shorter hospital stays lesss infection and less repeat visits and so we can really use this in so many spaces you can take your own home and just get some plants and repaint the different colors and clean everything up and tidy everything up so it's nice and clean and spacious and and this affects our own brains as well of course you can always donate there's three ways to donate you can donate time you can donate money and you can donate items you can donate these to pass at home.

40:30 - Carrie Rickert Okay.

41:13 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) We would love donations of those things. Or you can donate to your local organizations. Most of the shelters and many, many programs have volunteer opportunities where you could come and meet people who are experiencing homelessness and have personal relationships with them so that we can get rid of this idea that these are somehow other people. These are just regular folks. Like you said, you could have experienced homelessness if there weren't some protections there for you.

41:42 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) And I always say that you don't become homeless because you run out of money,

41:42 - Carrie Rickert Easily.

41:46 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) you become homeless when you run out of relationships. And so we be the relationship for people so that they feel that they are worthy and that they have a community.

41:49 - Carrie Rickert Yes, wow. If there's one thing that you want to make sure our listeners know, what would that be?

42:09 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) I think it would be that the solution to homelessness is housing. I think that's the most important thing and and then providing people with the support they needed to keep that housing and then I think the other thing would be that we really need to think about how we're designing our spaces everywhere I was in um doing there's a program here in in oregon where high school students get to do a grant making process and they get to give away money to nonprofits who are doing work in the community and they get you know ten thousand dollars from this foundation they get grant applications from non profits they do interviews and then they award this money and I was it's very cool I know I wish I had that when I was in high school.

42:48 - Carrie Rickert Oh, that's awesome. What a great lesson.

42:54 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) and I was with a high school class a couple months ago and they said, Well, what exactly is trauma informed design and architecture? So I was telling them all the things we've talked about today, and they kind of looked around their classroom and they said, that is not what we have here. And they, I said, Yeah, you're You know, they had concrete walls, no lights, no natural light, no plants, everything was really cluttered and chaotic. And we could be influencing the brains,

43:21 - Carrie Rickert Ahm.

43:24 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) especially of our young people so much if we created trauma informed spaces. So, so help people move back into housing and make sure that all of our spaces are trauma informed.

43:36 - Carrie Rickert I love that. I love that. So if someone wants to learn more about Path Home or needs help and is in the Portland area, how can they get in touch with you?

43:48 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) if someone needs help in there in the portland area they can call two one one and most communities around the country have a two one one it's kind of like nine one one or four one one but it's an information and referral hotline where all of the different services for shelters and housing programs and mental health care are are kind of resourced in this two one one line so if you're here in portland or oregon you call two one one and tell them that you are a person or a family experiencing homelessness, and they can get you connected with shelters and housing programs.

44:22 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) If you'd like to learn more about Path Home, you can visit our website at Path Dash Home, Dot Org, and you can learn about all of the different ways that you can support us, from volunteering to donating items like diapers and cleaning products and shampoo and toothpaste. And you can also learn about making a financial donation as well.

44:43 - Carrie Rickert awesome. Thank you, so much brandy. I I cannot begin to tell you how important I think this conversation is. Because as you said, this is the things that you're talking about really extends past homelessness, right? It, it is, how do we create for our communities that give everyone dignity everyone feel safe and comfortable and able to use their brains to the capacity.

45:31 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) That's right.

45:33 - Carrie Rickert Thank you, This is absolutely been wonderful and I have learned so much today, I really appreciate it. And I can't wait to hear what people think.

45:46 - Brandi Tuck (she/her) Thank you so much, Carrie. This is an honor to be able to talk with you today.