Everyone Needs a Place to Call Home

Serving in the U.S. Army, Andrew learned to persevere through adversity. He later spent years living outdoors in a tiny shelter in the hills above Fairfax. Life grew harder as he suffered seizures, debilitating migraines, vision problems, and memory issues.

“I lived outside for so long, I didn’t know how to get it together,” Andrew says. But then he found Homeward Bound of Marin, a nonprofit that aims to end homelessness across Marin County.

Founded with backing from Marin County’s interfaith community in 1974, Homeward Bound of Marin began with one family shelter that housed four families. Today it operates five shelter programs and 16 supportive housing programs that served 886 people (adults, families, seniors, and veterans) in the 2021-22 year.

Mary Kay Sweeney, the nonprofit’s co-CEO, says Homeward Bound is reaching for a goal called ‘functional zero.’ She describes it as “that point when someone falls into homelessness… It’s unusual, it’s brief, and it’s solvable.”

Veterans like Andrew make up seven percent of the adults served last year by Homeward Bound. Its programs offer counseling, case management, transportation, credit repair, and connections to services like health care. Homeward Bound provides the county’s only year-round shelter for families, programs for people with persistent mental health challenges, and job training at Fresh Starts Culinary Academy.

At New Beginnings Center, an 80-bed shelter for adults, a partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, designates 12 beds for veterans and provides an onsite VA representative to assist with specialized housing support and benefits.

This month, they will break ground on their newest project: a 24-unit veterans housing community adjoining Homeward Bound’s main campus in Novato.

“What we’re trying to do as a community is work on subpopulations of people – the chronically homeless, the veterans, the families, transitional age youth,” Sweeney says. By collaborating with community partners to target different needs, she adds, “…we’ll eventually get to nobody homeless.”

Andrew now is settled into a cozy home in Novato. “It’s very quiet here,” he says. “And that’s exactly what I needed. It fits. It’s perfect… I have connection. This is a home.”