soul care and social artistry at the intersection of homelessness, substance use and mental health.
Trainings
Grounded in years of empirical and ethical practice and held accountable by an advisory board of folks with lived experience, Sacred Streets develops and facilitates innovative, person-centered trainings and guidance for agencies, churches, businesses and individuals who have contact with those who live within the intersection of homelessness, substance use and mental health.
This includes emergency room and hospital staff, first responders, police officers and other crucial touch points. It also includes religious communities, social service agencies, city offices, business owners and neighborhood groups. These trainings and consultations will equip people to offer kind, compassionate and trauma-informed care on behalf of the most stigmatized members of our communities.
Our foundational training, the Way of Companionship developed by Mental Health Chaplaincy founder Craig Rennebohm, is offered regularly around the King County area and often sought out by religious communities desiring to grow awareness, compassion and impact. '
Contact us to attend an upcoming training or request one for your community or group.
Circles of Care
The journey to secure housing is laborious and complex. Once someone does move indoors, a host of other challenges arise: some people haven’t lived inside in years, walls can feel claustrophobic, and now they are isolated from a community on the street that often felt like family, however messy it may be.
Through Circles of Care we train, mobilize and equip groups from local faith communities to fill gaps of care for neighbors who transition from the street and into housing, particularly combating the isolation and overwhelm that often leads people back to the street or tragically, to overdose.
Sacred Streets accompanies Circles on their journey to offer support, education opportunities and encouragement throughout the life cycle of their commitment.
Curious about forming Circles of Care within your congregation or organization? Reach out here.
With homelessness at an all-time high and understaffed NGO’s causing service providers to experience a high rate of turnover and burnout, we believe faith communities are uniquely suited to offer a depth of care and companionship to our neighbors on the street that can only come from embodied presence.
Street Chaplains
Street chaplains are neighborhood based and also offer “rounds” at crisis clinics. We focus on caring for those who are the most vulnerable and hardest to reach in our communities. This means sitting with people in their suffering and acknowledging their attempts to make meaning and find relief. This also means greeting their inherent dignity and particularity in every encounter, offering active listening, love, care and accompaniment. The only agenda for these encounters is to call attention, reflect back and be an empathetic witness who holds, along with them, their own hopes for flourishing.
Social Artistry
Storytelling and acts of meaning making in the public square build a bridge across otherness, and building a bridge across otherness is what we must do before programmatic services and decisions are made on behalf of the precious other.
This is not being “a voice for the voiceless”. Our neighbors who sleep outside have beautiful, wise, distinctive voices but they often don’t have the privilege to stop long enough to access a shared table, share their own stories, participate community groups, or speak to policies.
We do our best to honor the precious other on the street as our teacher and only midwife stories where we have been given a blessing.
original art by Minah Kim Bass