Mystic Area Shelter and Hospitality

MASH Programs and Services

Shelter

MASH provides shelter for homeless families with children from New London County, Connecticut in our fully-furnished shelter units in a residential neighborhood.

MASH staff work with parents to address urgent family needs, including job search, family budgeting, arranging childcare, coordinating school placement, and accessing health care and counseling. We work closely with state and town services and with other non-profit service providers to help address additional family needs.

MASH is a partner in the New London County Unified Intake System for Homeless Families with Children. Through this system, we are working with the three other family shelter providers in our county to meet the urgent needs of families in our community facing homelessness. Here’s how it works:

• A family in urgent need of shelter is directed to the United Way of Connecticut’s 2-1-1 hotline (available any time of day or night, 7 days a week, all year round).
• A 2-1-1 operator will seek to assist with any needs a family may have, and will refer the family for a shelter intake the next business day.
• The next business day, the family will have an in-person meeting with a case manager from one of the family shelters, who will seek to assist the family in identifying housing solutions, or place the family in an emergency shelter opening if needed.

Please click here to read a story of a MASH shelter client family.* (ARIANA’S STORY)

Rapid Re-Housing

MASH works with families to move them from emergency shelter to permanent housing as quickly as possible. Our goal is to help every family in our emergency shelter program to be re-housed to their own permanent housing or to another, sustainable and appropriate housing situation in 30 days – a nationally recognized best-practices standard. MASH helps families to secure new housing by helping to identify housing options, securing required deposits and first month’s rent, and securing donations of household furnishings and necessities.

MASH embraces the “Housing First” approach: we believe that helping a homeless family to secure permanent housing is a top priority and should not be postponed pending the resolution of other possible family challenges. Securing new housing can create a stable basis from which a family can address other issues – whether that means the need to improve household income through better employment, committing to mental health treatment for PTSD, or addressing special educational needs of a child.

Studies show that the experience of homelessness is damaging to children’s well-being, ability to learn, and physical health. Helping families move to permanent housing as quickly as possible can help to minimize the damaging effects of homelessness on children. Rapid re-housing is also a cost-effective way to address homelessness: it reduces families’ time in shelter, and helps them return to appropriate permanent housing much more quickly than offering shelter alone.

Please click here to read a story of a MASH Rapid Re-Housing client family.* (MARCUS’S STORY)

Homelessness Prevention

Emergency Shelter is preferable to homelessness. But better than emergency shelter is keeping families in their own, permanent housing. By providing modest, short-term financial assistance (which may include rent or utility subsidies or similar assistance) and case management to families at imminent risk of homelessness, we can help keep these families in their current housing – out of the shelter system! This, in turn, helps to ensure that the limited stock of emergency shelter in our community is available for those families who have no other alternatives. At the same time, helping families avoid losing their housing and slipping into homelessness allows them to avoid the trauma and stress associated with homelessness – and the damaging side effects that stress can bring with it. Please click here to read a story of a MASH Homelessness Prevention client family.* (JANELLE AND GREG’S STORY)

* Stories are based on actual MASH clients, although names have been changed.