First Shift: Mary's Place

...316 days to go...

Kids should not be homeless.

And yet…

According to the 2024 King County point-in-time count, there were 1,959 kids under 18 in Seattle without a home. During an average night of 2024, about 300 of these kids stayed at Mary’s Place, and another 300 or so stayed at other shelters in King County¹. That still leaves over 1,400 kids either in Tiny Homes, tents, or worse. As a parent, it breaks my heart that so many kids lack even the basic security of a roof over their head. So I suspected early on that Mary’s Place, which helps not only the kids under its roof but also other King County families it lacks the space to house, would be an organization I’d like to help.

Mary’s Place is a family shelter committed to the idea that no child should sleep outside. They give priority to families with (i) kids under 2, (ii) pregnant women, (iii) medically fragile kids, and (iv) domestic violence situations. The organization also offers rental assistance to precariously housed families to keep them from becoming homeless in the first place (as I’ve mentioned, I’m really excited about these types of ‘diversion’ efforts, so I plan to explore this opportunity in detail in some future posts).

Since 2016, Amazon has provided Mary’s Place with a physical location in its downtown Seattle campus. I’m usually pretty cynical toward Amazon when it comes to its philanthropic efforts, but here I really have to give them credit. I was given a tour, and the space is tremendous.

The entire space, which spans eight floors and 63,000 square feet, is clean and brightly lit thanks to the walls of windows which any Amazonian would recognize as standard fare in many of its headquarters buildings. The cafeteria is an open area with plenty of high-quality tables and seating. There’s a laundry area for families to wash their own clothes on their own time. The organization operates a ‘store’ for guests who need footwear, apparel, and hygiene items which is actually quite well merchandised, with separate sections for kids and grown-ups, outerwear, tops, bottoms and the like. The hotel rooms are spartan, but each contain two bunk beds and shelves for storage - imagine a Tiny Home but attached to all the services of a shelter with the city just outside. There are scattered desks and nooks throughout for work or schoolwork, and a number of crannies for kids to explore.

The star of the show (to me) was the Kids Club, a beautiful space which strongly reminded me of the expensive Bright Horizons daycare that Natalie attended as a four-year-old, and which was also located in a corporate office building downtown. Like most Amazon office buildings, the windows open, allowing in fresh air at the cost of a small amount of heartburn (this is a space inhabited by toddlers who like to crawl on desks, after all).

The space is decked out to a toddler’s delight with brightly colored mats, finger-paints and easels, musical instruments, books and toys. I have no doubt Rosie would have a blast exploring the room, and I’d have no hesitation dropping her off there if I needed to work.

All of this infrastructure is impressive, but what really matters is how it works in practice. During my first volunteer shift, I got to see the space come alive.

My first shift at Mary’s Place was dinner service. Dinner was fish (cod, I think, though nobody knew for sure) with broccoli on rice, a healthy and pretty tasty meal that I would have been proud to serve to my own family at home.

The kids entertained us all throughout the shift. One young girl with an apparent love of broccoli kept bursting into tears until she was given more veggies. We could all learn some eating habits from her.

After they finished eating, many of the kids hung out together and played in the generously-sized cafeteria and the nearby hallways. It actually felt a bit like travelling back in time to the 1950s when (I’ve heard) moms would kick their kids out the door and expect them to entertain themselves. I actually wish my own kids could have a bit more of that type of communal living - it feels like each of their playdates must be carefully planned and coordinated, and as a result they don’t happen nearly often enough. There was something refreshing about the spontaneity of the Mary’s Place kids’ play.

As a dad, I know that a clean, bright place to sleep and good food is necessary but not sufficient for a kid to thrive. Over the coming months I plan to spend more time at Mary’s Place, helping homeless kids who are lucky enough to have a bed there with homework, reading, and just having fun. But there’s well over 1,400 kids in our county who lack even a shelter bed, and given Mary’s Place’s outreach efforts to those families, I plan to work with the organization to see if I can help a few of those kids, too. More to come.

1. According to Mary’s Place, which operates the King County Emergency Family Shelter Hotline.