What do you think of when you hear the word homeless?

What images come to mind? What do you see?

For 25 years The Samaritan Center in Simi Valley has been on a mission to challenge those preconceptions.

Society tends to put all homeless people in single box. We regard the homeless population as a troubled mass, losing sight of their humanity and individuality. Luckily, The Samaritan Center is here to acknowledge the nuances of homelessness and treat each homeless person who walks through their doors as a single entity, with their own distinct set of personal needs. “There’s no typical client for The Samaritan Center,” says Betty Eskey, the Director of The Samaritan Center. “Everybody’s different.”

The Samaritan Center’s clients vary significantly from one another. For starters, they range in age from 18 to over 70 years old, and it’s pretty obvious the needs of an 18-year-old and a 70-year-old are going to be vastly different. “There’s a wide spectrum of the folks that we meet,” says Eskey. “We have an architect, we have a retired teacher, we have a woman who expected her life to be normal at 70 years old, but through the economic downturn she lost everything.”

It’s addressing these differences that is the hallmark of The Samaritan Center’s care. On top of providing basic services like food, clothes, and showers, they also have a full wraparound case management program. This involves developing a personalized action plan for each client, and then walking them through the entire process. These action plans can take anywhere from 30 days to 2 years to complete, depending on the client.

Often times a particular action plan will require a client to receive services outside of what The Samaritan Center can provide on their own. To help tackle these cases, The Samaritan Center has partnerships with other organizations within Simi Valley who lend a helping hand.

The Samaritan Center convenes for a monthly meeting with other case managers and directors of social services in the community to discuss resourcing and clients. This coalition consists of the police department, the free clinic, behavioral health agencies, and other counseling services, who all come together to help push through the process of getting a client out of homelessness and into the particular programs they need.

Despite the myriad differences between The Samaritan Center’s clients, there is a common similarity most of them share. Eskey says, “By the time they come to us, many of them have lost hope. That’s the common thread.”

One of these hopeless clients came to The Samaritan Center while battling addiction and PTSD, and had just been forced to give custody of her son over to his father after losing her home and getting two DUIs in two weeks. The Samaritan Center brought her to a rehab facility in Santa Monica where she received treatment for a year.

Cut to: the present day, 7 years later. This same formerly-hopeless client now has a home, her son back, and a job as an accountant that pays over $60,000 a year.

At it’s core, The Samaritan Center restores hope to anyone who enters. “If one of our clients can’t leave with hope,” says Eskey, “we didn’t do our job today.”

You can show your support of The Samaritan Center by donating your time, money, or goods. Learn more here.