A Great Day

Today my intro class volunteered at the Pine Street Inn in Boston. Pine Street is a homeless shelter that serves about 1000 people per day. That's around 14% of Boston's overall homeless population of 7000. Around 400 beds provide overnight accommodations to men and women each night.



My classmate Yuki and I (hairnets are quite becoming, aren't they?) helped make 250+ sandwiches and bagged lunches to be distributed in outreach efforts to people remaining on the streets. It's amazing what the kitchen at Pine Street churns out - breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday.



Our final project for this semester is to design and built an interior element for one of Pine Street's transitional houses located in Jamaica Plain. The site is a converted convent that will have 28 SROs (Single Room Occupancy) for people transitioning from homelessness into steady employment. The eight person class has been divided into two groups, one for the SROs and one for common areas. I'll be working on one of the common areas (pictured below) with a partner - and another group of two will take a second common area. For the common areas, the directors of the housing project have requested a space that will bring people out of their single rooms and create a sense of community. The median age of the men and women living at the shelter will probably be early 50s - some of whom have been homeless for decades and some of whom have a mental illness.






The house is currently under construction, so unfortunately when we visited today there weren't any residents to speak with about what we could possibly design for our respective spaces. Touring the Pine Street Inn shelter facilities earlier in the day gave us a tremendous amount of insight - but it's not the same as speaking with the user. To that end, I'm looking into shelter facilities in Providence and NH that I might be able to visit and volunteer at to look a bit closer.

This project is going to be awesome. Classes in previous years have worked on many different versions of it, donating furniture and installed pieces to Pine Street Inn and their satellite facilities. I'm excited. We're presenting our ideas to the class next Tuesday, to the clients next Thursday, and then we build until December.

Ready...go! Take this squirrel just in case - he knows the neighborhood.