ON THE STREETS

No place like Virginia’s Place

By Noah Bruce

Put a city that doesn’t offer any long-term shelter for young, homeless moms together with a crisis in low-income housing and you’ve got a serious social problem.

Alleviating this need, MY CHOICE, a program for expectant mothers aged 14 to 25 from turbulent backgrounds, is creating a new transitional house called Virginia’s Place. Located at 107 India Street, the house will consist of four apartments — two one-bedrooms and two two-bedrooms — where women can live after having their babies and graduating from the MY CHOICE program.

MY CHOICE currently has an eight-bed facility on Congress Street that serves pregnant women only. Virginia’s Place is the next logical step.

“The girls that came to MY CHOICE shelter would move out and they couldn’t find low-income housing anywhere [in Portland],” says Virginia Boyles, director of the MY CHOICE program (the staff voted to name the house after her). “They’d move out into the new community and leave the services that we set up: including counseling, education, goal planning, parenting, and medical services.”

“When you isolate a girl and her baby from her support network, you have a potentially dangerous situation,” says Lisa Naseef, development specialist at MY CHOICE. “A newborn infant and homeless teen is about the most vulnerable section of society you can have.”

Fortuitously, program directors were able to find a house for the new transitional program that was right around the corner from the Congress Street facility, so women at Virginia’s Place will have easy access to the services they received during pregnancy. “It was like it was meant to be,” said Boyles.

MY CHOICE was able to buy the house and pay to fix it up with donations including $110,000 from the Libra Foundation, $88,000 from the Maine State Housing Authority, and an anonymous donation of $50,000. The new program is scheduled to open early next summer after renovations are complete.

While living at Virginia’s Place, young women will pay one third of their income for rent and must either work or take high school or college classes. Residents will also help to create rules for the program like whether they are allowed to spend nights away from the house.

Naseef stresses the importance of this type of program. “It’s totally unacceptable for Portland not to have this kind of service,” she says. “It’s horrible, but every so often in big cities you hear about a woman throwing away her baby in a dumpster or a toilet. This [program] prevents that.”