Transition House names facility after McCune

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

After receiving a $250,000 donation that will ensure money given to the Transition House will be spent on helping local homeless families and not on loans, the organization renamed its emergency shelter the McCune Family Transition House to recognize local philanthropist Sara Miller McCune, who donated the money.
Kathleen Baushke, executive director of the Transition House, said the emergency shelter’s $2.7 million renovation last year left the organization with about a half-a-million in debt. She said an ambitious fundraising effort came up with the initial $250,000 and McCune matched the remainder.

“It’s a huge thing for us because it means in the future instead of paying off a bank loan we can use donations to pay for direct services to clients,” Baushke said. “We never wanted to carry any long-term debt.”
For McCune, who founded SAGE Publications in 1965, helping quell the impacts of homelessness is nothing new.
“I first published about homelessness as a growing problem in 1971,” McCune said. “To my sorrow, it has become more of a problem in the decades since.”
The magnitude of that problem is evident by the demand for the programs and opportunities the Transition House provides.
The emergency shelter houses 70 people and has been at full capacity since April, Baushke said.
She said last week the shelter had to turn away eight families, which is unusually high.
“We’ve seen more [homeless families] in the last couple of months,” Baushke said. “We hope it’s not a trend, we hope it was just a bad month, but there’s clearly a need there.”
Transition House does just what it sounds like: transitioning people out of homelessness and into affordable housing.
The first stage is the emergency shelter, while the second stage, Baushke said, is a transitional housing facility called the Fire House, which holds six families. The final piece of the puzzle is getting people into affordable housing units, of which Transition House owns 26 and has eight more units on the way.
A statement issued by Transition House says in order to help families escape poverty and become economically self-sufficient, they are provided with case management, assistance with a savings plan, job placement and classes in career development, ESL, computer skills and parenting.
According to a Transition House fact sheet, 14 percent of the general population and 20 percent of children in Santa Barbara County live in poverty. Of all the jobs in Santa Barbara, 20 percent pay below the poverty line of $1,493 per month, with the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment starting at $1,400.
In order to battle these numbers and remodel the emergency facility, Baushke said 681 community members, 13 faith organizations, 17 corporations and 23 local and Southern California foundations donated money.
The Transition House program falls into place with some people’s belief that actively providing necessary programs to the homeless population, rather than encouraging them to seek programs out, is the way to get people off the streets.
Mike Foley, executive director of the Casa Esperanza shelter, has said in interviews with the Daily Sound that one of the first steps in being successful at this is getting the homeless into affordable housing and providing the programs individuals need there.
“We have very good shelter programs, but we can’t get people out of their situation unless there are apartments to move them into and that’s Santa Barbara’s big problem,” Baushke said. “We don’t need more shelter beds, we need more affordable apartments to put people in.”