Winter 2022 Update from Aileen’s: Accomplishments & Celebration

We can’t believe that it’s almost December, but 2022 has been an amazing year of expansion and transition here at Aileen’s. Here are some highlights from the last six months or so:

  • We moved into a new and larger space and made it gorgeous! Everyone loves how warm and cozy our new space is. We are planning to start drop-in hours in January–for the first time since COVID forced us to shut down.
  • We held an open house at the new location in September and it was a success! Thank you to those of you who attended!
  • We recruited and started our new Peer Leadership Cohort! With members of our initial cohort that started in 2019 in the paid staff position now, we are expanding to involve more peers in the leadership roles within the organization.
  • We made our very first film, WE ARE AILEENS. It is a film featuring our people discussing our namesake, Aileen Wuronos, and how we experienced “bad dates” and are supporting each other. Join our screenings in Portland and south King County in December!
  • We did voter registration during outreach throughout October. We registered more than 50 people who are homeless, drug users, or with criminal records—folks who are often discussed in political campaigns as the problem to be dealt with or eradicated and not usually listened to. On the day of the election, we hosted “Vote for Hope” non-partisan BBQ party across the street from the polling place to encourage people without mailing address to vote in-person.
  • With our expansion and upcoming changes, here are our needs right now:

  • Donation of stuff! We especially need warm clothes including coats, gloves, hand/leg warmers, etc. as well as blankets, sleeping bags, and other stuff people need during rainy winter. We also need other cute and clean clothes for women.
  • Volunteers! As we re-start drop-in hospitality spaces, we’ll need extra help Friday evenings for hospitality space and outreach. We also need help preparing for outreach on Thursdays. If you are available on some other days, do let us know so we can discuss how you can help us do things like organizing fundraisers, doing skillshares, etc.
  • Also, we always appreciate financial support! Please donate on GoFundMe at and/or make a monthly pledge on Patreon.

Thank you and we hope to see you at our film screening in December!

Aileen’s Success List
Peer Designed Shirts at Aileen’s Open House
Aileen’s Vote for Hope BBQ
WE ARE AILEENS
WE ARE AILEENS film

Aileen’s OPEN HOUSE at the new location — Wednesday, September 21st @ 6pm

Hello Friends & Fam,

[RSVP here]

We have a great news: we have a new location, which is a lot bigger and nicer than the last two spaces we occupied, thanks to State Sen. Claire Wilson and Rep. Jamila Taylor’s advocacy to help us access more funds.

We are working hard to set up the new space while we continue doing outreach, peer leadership development, and the rest of our regular activities serving women and trans/nonbninary folks working along the Pac Highway.

Here are some photos of our new space as we continue the process of moving in:

We are inviting our friends and family to an OPEN HOUSE on Wednesday, September 21st at 6-9pm. Join us at the new space to come check it out, meet our peer staff, and learn more about what we do + how you can be involved. The location (which is to remain confidential) is provided prior to the event date to people who RSVP, but it is on Pac Highway in south King County.

Thank you + we hope to see you in September!

P.S.
We will be tabling at Seattle Trans Pride on September 2nd. Please come say hi!

Aileen’s (Almost) June 2021 Update: Inaugural Cohort of Aileen’s Peer Leaders to Graduate (& Get Hired)

Hello friends of Aileen’s,

It’s been over a year since our beautiful community was dealt a huge blow as COVID-19 pandemic spread, forcing us to temporarily shut down our busy community organizing and hospitality space and improvise food and resource distribution out of parking lots as we all lived through a crisis.

Aileen’s peer leaders have been there all along, gathering several times every week to distribute food, personal protection equipment, supplies, clothing, and other resources to the community in dire need after many open public spaces and charity services disappeared. Out of our first cohort of ten peer leaders, seven of them still remain (our original plan was to add new folks and graduate older ones as we went, but it didn’t go as planned due to the pandemic), and they have come a long way in their personal healing and growth coinciding with the growth of Aileen’s as an organization. We are happy to report that majority of our peer leaders are no longer homeless. Other milestones for individual peer leaders include graduating from substance use treatment, making progress on court-related issues, restoration of driving privileges, progress on goals related to harm reduction and health, and surviving the pandemic.

In June, we are holding a graduation ceremony for our initial cohort of Aileen’s peer leadership team, some of whom will move on to paid staff positions at Aileen’s to mentor and support new groups of women. In fact, a couple of them have already been hired and we plan to add more as we can figure out finances and logistics. As staff, they will receive a yearlong staff training program with the goal of each of them developing their own case management caseloads and becoming Washington State certified peer counselors.

(Here goes the obligatory fundraising pitch): Thank you for your continued support for Aileen’s as we move out of the improvisational crisis response mode and embark on a long-term strategy to draw our peer leaders into more executive positions within the organization. We appreciate your financial support as well as donations of food, clothing, and other resources, and social support connecting us to people and resources you have access to via social media and word of mouth.

As always, one-time or monthly donations can be made on our online platforms, and if you have items to donate, please do not hesitate to email us at info@aileens.org. We are also looking for volunteers who are fully vaccinated who can come help with our outreach, especially if you can drive.

One-time donation – gofundme
http://gofundme.com/aileens/

Monthly donations – patreon
http://patreon.com/aileens/

Follow us on social media (sorry not updated very frequently–need help)
http://facebook.com/aileenshome
https://twitter.com/aileenshome
https://www.instagram.com/aileenshome/

We are starting South King County Bad Date Line!

We are starting South King County Bad Date Line!

A “bad date” is someone who is violent or dangerous toward those of us working in the sex trade. We share identifying information about dangerous people we encounter, such as what they look like, what car they drive, where they were, and what they did, so that we can help each other make more informed decisions about what we do. We welcome people of any gender to report bad dates.

You can give us an anonymous report through:

1) phone/voice mail: Leslie @ 253-241-1205
2) email: baddate@aileens.org
3) facebook message to @aileenshome
4) in person at Aileen’s open hours or outreach
5) on our south king county bad date line page

Contact us if you have any questions!

Support Black mom and kids stay together & stay housed

Support Tee & Kids
Support Tee and Kids Stay Together & Housed!

Click this link to donate to help Tee and her kids!

Tee is a single Black mom with two beautiful girls ages 7 and 9. Tee’s story is one of hardship, homelessness, and systemic racism, as well as incredible resiliency, strength, and a mother’s love. Racism, childhood abuse, and a lack of support led Tee to struggle both emotionally and financially as a young adult. After a devastating break up that left Tee to raise her daughters alone, she fell into using drugs as a coping mechanism.

Tee’s love for her daughters led her to call Child Protective Services for help. That’s right Tee called the state of Washington for help to go to treatment and get stable housing for herself and her daughters and in return the state of Washington literally kidnapped her children.

Even though there has never been any allegation of abuse or neglect toward her daughters the state has used the fact that Tee admitted she had used drugs to remove them from Tee’s care for almost two years. Although the state never helped Tee to get treatment nor housing and have actively worked against her every step of the way, Tee has struggled through homelessness and heartbreak to get herself into treatment, get a part time job, and transitional housing.

Tee came to Aileen’s over a year ago now. She started as a peer who attended our hospitality space and soon joined our Peer Leadership program and became a key peer leader. Tee showed up on the regular and worked hard helping to run Aileen’s including outreach, distributing food to the community, and hosting our space. Most importantly Tee brought herself. Tee has a way of making things fun and the other women look up to her.

Tee loves to sing and dance and joke around but she also has a serious side when advocating for her women of color, LGBT, and recovery communities. As a mother Tee is amazing. She has kept up any and all contact she has been allowed with her daughters including daily phone calls and supervised visits. Tee is open and honest with her daughters and takes the time to really listen to them.

Recently, Tee has been hired as paid staff at Aileen’s. We are so lucky to have her as our case manager and office assistant and she has been branching out into community education, giving presentations, and working one on one with peers on their goals. In addition, Tee joined with some of the other peer leaders to found an independent, collective recovery house where women can stay for up to one year. This is where Tee currently resides and where her kids could stay with her in a safe, supportive environment.

Unbelievably, this still isn’t good enough for the state of Washington! They are still erecting barriers and refusing to return custody to Tee. At this point Tee desperately needs an attorney who can expose what the state has been doing and get her daughters returned to her ASAP. Time is running out as the state could soon permanently terminate Tee’s parental rights with no chance of ever getting them back.

Tee needs money to pay a retainer for a good attorney and to get permanent housing for her and her daughters. Please help in this battle against the racist New Jim Crow drug war policies that are continuing to be used to tear apart Black families.

Aileen’s November 2020 Update

Hello friends of Aileen’s!

It has been a difficult year, but Aileen’s continues to support women in south King County in best ways we can.

Since mid-March, we’ve had to close our communal space and switched our services to food and resources giveaway out of a parking lot. Our peer leaders, volunteers, and staff gave away boxes and boxes of food, clothes, hand sanitizers and masks, harm reduction supplies, and other stuff, expanding our services to anyone who needed them to counter immediate impact of the lockdown.

In late summer, we took a week off for what is going to be our annual peer leader retreat. We brought in a trainer to talk about our individual and community priorities and accomplishments, and map out our future. Over the last year, we have stepped up case management for our peer leaders on things like getting driver’s license back, dealing with court and CPS issues, etc. and peer leaders are beginning to take greater power and responsibilities within our organization, with three peer leaders moving on to become paid staff members for Aileen’s.

Aileen's Retreat 2020
Aileen’s Retreat 2020

We also began to slowly re-open our space, allowing 1-2 people inside at the time so that they can use our bathroom and shower. We also set up a canopy outside our space with an outdoor heater so we can meet our peers there. That has become harder under the Governor’s new order limiting outdoor gatherings to five people or less, but we are working to protect everyone’s safety while providing what they need. We prepare hot nutritious food from scratch for 50-75 people every week like split pea soup, chili, chicken and dumplings, and cole slaw. In addition to our outdoor canopy, we currently go to three locations on our outreach van to continue providing food and supplies to everyone in need, especially with the return of the cold, rainy season.

Prepping for Outreach
Prepping for Outreach

Particularly high on our updated wishlist are: blanket, coats, socks, hand warmers, boots, propane bottles, tents, hand sanitizers. We also need clothes, food, and other personal supplies. And in case you are wondering, we also take cash 🙂

If you have something you can drop off, please contact us.

Donations can be made online at:

http://patreon.com/aileens
http://gofundme.com/aileens

Volunteering for Aileen’s looks different because of the COVID restrictions, but we continue to need volunteers who: 1. cook food before our outreach (outreach is every Tuesday evening, so cooking need to be done on Monday or Tuesday morning); 2. drive our van when we go out on outreach (also Tuesday evening), or help with data entry. Please contact us if you are interested. (And also, if you are an existing volunteer, thank you and we still need you.)

Also: we were recently invited by another social service provider to give a couple of online trainings (one about harm reduction and another about supporting sex workers and people in the sex trade) and it was a great experience. Our new peer leader turned staff Teranie and Devyn joined co-founders Leslie and Emi on these presentations. We want to do more! If your organization needs a staff training on these topics–or have some other idea–please contact us!

Thank you for your support + let’s hang in there!

Aileen’s June 2020 Update + Standing In Solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter

It’s June and we are in the midst not just of an ongoing epidemic that continues to threaten the lives of many of our community members but also of a national moment of reflection and action over white supremacy and police violence on Black, indigenous and people of color upon which this country is founded. We are heartbroken by ongoing assaults and murders of Black people at the hands of the agents of the State as well as by the society that is too quick to rely on them, yet encouraged by the outpouring of empathy and outrage in response to the tragedies.

We at Aileen’s stand in solidarity with the family and friends of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmed Aubrey, Charleena Lyles, and countless other Black men and women who have been brutalized and murdered by our white supremacist institutions, and with the movement for Black lives in calling not just for the arrest and prosecution of individual officers involved, but for systemic changes. If you have not already, please follow and support Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County (facebook, twitter).

For our neighbors in Federal Way (where Aileen’s is located) and nearby areas, follow Federal Way Black Collective, who is holding a Juneteenth screening of the award-winning documentary film “13th,” which traces the genealogy of over-policing of Black communities, mass incarceration, and prison industrial complex to American chattel slavery. They are also looking for volunteers who can help out with their food distribution that they are starting next week Friday.

June is also the LGBTQ Pride month. It is hard to feel like celebrating anything right now, but we are proud of the legacy of queer and trans women of color and others who have risen up against racialized police violence in June 1969 as the police raided Stonewall Inn and ever since, and we commit to carrying on their quest for equality and justice within our organization, our region, and in the larger society.

Here’s the update from Aileen’s for June: we will continue to provide food, clothes, supplies, and other stuff twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) at our location in Federal Way (contact if you need more detail) as we did for the last couple of months. HOWEVER, in the last two months we were donate pre-packaged meals to distribute (150 meals each day we were out there), but that supply of food has ended at the end of May. That means we have to buy food and prepare them so that we can continue to feed people in need at our van location, which will be a lot more expensive and time-consuming that it had been before, but we can’t stop feeding people in the time of crisis.

So as always we appreciate your continued support of Aileen’s—use GoFundMe (one-time) or Patreon (monthly contributions) to donate online, or contact us if you need donation receipts for tax purposes (we need to process tax deductible donations differently). We also need donations of food and supplies—please see our updated wishlist for what we need at our giveaway van location.

Thank you + stay safe + stay connected!

May 2020 Update from Aileen’s

Dear Aileen’s fam,

It’s May and we wanted to update you about how Aileen’s is continuing to support our women and our communities.

Since the lockdown began mid-March, we noticed that many services for communities experiencing homelessness and poverty have shut down. For example, there used to be a van parked near our space every week operated by a faith-based group that provided food and resources to our folks but no longer. In response, we decided to take over their location and now our staff and peer leaders are there twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) providing food, clothes, supplies, and more. Please see our social media accounts (Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook) for some photos!

We also temporarily extended our services to anyone who needs them (as opposed to just women who engage in sex trade) as the community needs were far greater than ever before. COVID-19 isn’t the only emergency faced by this population, as access to food, clean water, public restrooms, showers, laundry, place to rest, etc. have become sparse. We can’t replace everything that is missing, but we are doing what we can.

We have received a couple of grants as well as generous donations from our friends and family, but we often run out of things to give out during first hour or less, so your continued support is desperately needed at this time. Most desired items are: food, good clothes, tents, sleeping bags, blankets, tarps, hygiene items, gift cards to grocery stores. Please see our complete and updated wishlist.

We of course appreciate $$$ donations. For monthly donations, go to Patreon; One-time donations can be made via GoFundMe. If you need a donation receipt for tax purposes, we need to process it differently so please contact us.

Please take care of yourself and our community and let’s live through this together.

Aileen’s July 2020 Schedule — Expanded services in response to COVID-19 crisis (Updated)

Starting July, we are beginning to re-open our space for our women so that they can enter up to two persons at the time to use the shower and receive other services while continuing to provide food and other resources to anyone who needs them.

Tuesdays @ 8-10pm
meet us at the location Hope Van used to go @ Pac & 312th (parking lot near World Ministries, 1627 S 312th St). everyone welcome (men & women).
food, hot drinks, harm reduction and other essential supplies.

Thursdays @ 8-10pm
harm reduction supplies available at the Hope Van location on Pac & 312th.
showers for women only (first come first served) available at Aileen’s. contact for the location.

Aileen’s is a peer-led grass-roots group providing hospitality, community outreach, and leadership development for women working along the Pac Hwy.

If you are a woman who work along the Pac Hwy and have other urgent needs, please call Leslie at 253-241-1205 or talk to one of the peer leaders at the above location.

Aileen’s 1 Yr Anniversary Update & How we are responding to COVID-19 pandemic

Hello friends and family of Aileen’s,

As we are collectively facing and dealing with social and economic impacts of the ongoing pandemic, we wanted to update you, our friends and family, about where Aileen’s is on its first anniversary.

We didn’t imagine the world under quarantine when Aileen’s was founded about a year ago, but we couldn’t have imagined how far our peer-led hospitality and community organizing project by and for women working along the Pac Highway would grow either. In the last year, we have formally launched peer leadership program, which provides intensive case management and stipends to our peer leaders that enable them to run various aspects of Aileen’s, from hosting our drop-in hospitality space to doing harm reduction outreach and community-based action research. Our peers have come a long way—many of them are progressing toward their goals, including getting needed medical treatment, getting into housing, staying away from violent environment, rebuilding or maintaining relationships with their children, etc.

Circumstances surrounding our peers, many of whom lack stable housing, have been dire for a very long time. But things have gotten much worse under the current pandemic. Libraries, day centers, and other public spaces–where our peers receive services, use restroom, take shower, wash hands, cook or have a meal, be warm, interact with family and friends, charge their devices, and access health and public assistance information–are shut down. Without access to public wifi, many of our peers cannot connect to the internet or communicate with anyone. They do not have anywhere to lay down or self-isolate themselves to protect themselves and others. Their income from day labor, panhandling, street vending, and underground economy is way down in a ghost town, which leads them to take greater health and safety risks in order to survive and take care of their needs. They are having to travel further to get food and other resources they need, which is putting themselves at the risk of contracting or spreading infections. Many of the women we serve are women of color and/or trans or gender-diverse individuals who face extra stigma and violence on top of being homeless or having dependencies on substances, even at healthcare facilities, making them less likely to seek medical attention, and even when they do, they may not be treated respectfully.

Sadly we are not currently operating our drop-in hospitality space due to the pandemic, but we are still meeting our peers at our new space to hand out food, pre-packed meals, clothes, blankets, harm reduction supplies, health information, and other resources while minimizing risks associated with crowding. We have purchased cheap phones and prepaid phone cards to our peer leaders so that they can stay in touch with us as well as with their family and friends, and also access health information for themselves and their communities. We are increasing staff hours (including hiring a new part-time employee with public health background) in order to take additional health precautions, and obtain and provide resources that are in greater need due to other services closing.

In short, this is a difficult time for all of us, and particularly for women of Aileen’s, but we are still working for our women. And we will get through this together.

Will you join in our effort? We are not looking for regular volunteers because our hospitality space is closed, but we need donations more than ever! Do you have non-perishable (good, healthful) food? Good clothes? Tents, sleeping bags, tarps, propane, backpacks, etc.? Maybe I’m fantasizing, but maybe even masks, hand sanitizers, alcohol and bleach wipes, etc.? We need them all!

As always, we appreciate cash donations as well—donate online via GoFundMe (one-time) or Patreon (monthly pledge) so we can provide what our women need. Ideally we’d like to have enough funds to house our peers in a motel for a couple of weeks and deliver food and necessities to them when they are exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 but we don’t have that kind of resources at this point. Please help us prepare for that, and pay for the additional expenses mentioned above! We realize that many of you are also experiencing financial hardship or uncertainty due to business closures and impending recession, and we really appreciate your support.

Please stay connected (virtually), take care of yourself, your family, and your community, and let’s live through this together.