Deborah's Place

Deborah’s Place opens doors for women experiencing homelessness in Chicago. Supportive housing and services offer women their key to healing, achieving their goals and moving on from the experience of homelessness.

Our vision is a community where every woman has housing and leads a safe, healthy and empowered life.

We accomplish our vision in the following ways:

• Providing housing and services to women experiencing homelessness
• Helping women in our housing to maintain their housing
• Empowering women to safely exit our programs to stable housing in the community, when and if they are ready

With two main program sites in Chicago as well as community-based housing located throughout the city, Deborah’s Place programs impact around 370 women annually and include:

• Permanent Supportive Housing: 129 units of permanent supportive housing for women with histories of chronic homelessness, located across two program sites. Permanent supportive housing pairs secure housing with wrap-around supportive services to help women heal from prolonged homelessness.
• Community-Based Housing: 113 subsidized, scattered-site housing units through partnerships with private landlords, located on the North, West and South sides of Chicago. Community-Based Housing provides women with their own apartments and subsidies to keep those apartments, and ongoing case management to help them stay housed and achieve their goals.
• Teresa’s Interim Housing Program: 10-bed short term residential program focused on rapid re-housing. Our only short-term housing program, Teresa’s provides women experiencing homelessness with safe, stable lodging and case management to help women overcome barriers to housing such as eviction records and low credit scores.
• Dolores’ Safe Haven Program: Long-term housing for 15 women who have experienced chronic homelessness, have been diagnosed with a severe mental illness, and have been difficult to engage in supportive services. The Safe Haven is one of only four such programs in the city and the only program of its kind specifically for women.

Comprehensive Support Services for Program Residents and Participants

• Case Management and Therapeutic Services: Clinical Services staff help women access services and resources to meet their needs, provide emotional support and assist with the identification and achievement of participants’ goals
• Health Services: Crisis management, health education, healthcare referrals, and assistance with medical/dental expenses
• Education and Life Skills Services: GED tutoring, computer training, budgeting, and other group-based and one-on-one activities through on-site Learning Centers
• Moving On and Alumnae Services: Deborah’s Place offers ongoing assistance including case management, peer support groups, and semi-annual gatherings for former residents of Deborah’s Place.

Deborah’s Place offers well-researched, evidence-based solutions to homelessness. Below find a discussion of three of our core strategies.

Supportive Housing

Research has proven that providing safe, secure housing is the most effective approach to ending homelessness. Supportive housing pairs housing with intensive case management and other services that guide participants to stability and health. Our Housing First approach means that we work with those who are most in need, accepting them as they are and helping them to become the best they can be.

Harm Reduction

This approach is used to improve quality of life for women at any stage of recovery. Our team “meets women where they are at” and works to understand the behaviors that may place them at risk of harm. While usually applied in cases of substance abuse, our staff apply harm reduction to help participants empower themselves to reduce risk in all areas of their lives. Deborah’s Place believes that housing is a human right, and should not be abstinence-based.

Trauma Informed Care

At Deborah’s Place we recognize that many of our participants have experienced high levels of trauma due to the experience of homelessness alone. Our programming is responsive to participants’ needs, and supports control and choice. We work to promote physical and emotional safety throughout our housing programs.

Deborah’s Place is the largest provider of permanent supportive housing for women experiencing homelessness in Chicago.

Deborah’s Place has been providing for unaccompanied women experiencing homelessness for 35 years.

Every year, we achieve over a 97% housing retention rate among our permanent housing residents. These results are among the highest in Chicago and in the nation.

Deborah’s Place provides services that are research-proven and evidence-based. Core tenets of our service model (Housing First, harm reduction, trauma-informed care, serving women who are transgender as well as cisgender, etc.) are based on extensive research, and were adopted by Deborah’s Place long before their acknowledgement by the federal government and disseminated as best practices across the human services landscape.

Deborah’s Place is a leader in homeless services in Chicago. Leadership and staff serve on numerous committees in the Chicago Continuum of Care and help set policy and best practices for the homeless services community as a whole.

Deborah’s Place is award-winning. Over the years, our programs and services have received awards from the Corporation for Supportive Housing, the Emergency Fund, Presence Health Lakeshore, the Chicago Foundation for Women, the MetLife Foundation and many, many other organizations.

Over our 35-year history, Deborah’s Place has evolved from a small volunteer-run overnight shelter in a church basement to the largest provider of permanent supportive housing for women in Chicago. And we aren’t done growing: over the next five years, Deborah’s Place aims to nearly double the number of women we serve per year.

We have resolved to do this because there are around 2,000 women experiencing homelessness in Chicago right now—and that’s just the number that are in emergency shelters/contacted by street outreach workers. Nearly ten times that number are estimated to be living “doubled-up,” staying with a friend or family due to loss of housing or economic hardship. There is a need for more permanent housing for women recovering from homelessness.

We aim to reach this auspicious goal through the following methods:

• Increasing our housing stock by adding new units and subsidies to current programs, particularly the Community-Based Housing program
• Developing our moving on programming, to help current permanent supportive housing residents move out into the community and make space for new tenants who need higher levels of care
• Identifying resources for new initiatives: housing, capital, service etc.
• Improving our capacity to raise funds from individuals, foundations and corporations
• Investing in board and staff development to ensure achievement of strategic goals