Teal Street Center celebrates with ribbon-cutting a year after social agencies begin providing services

Published 9:30 pm Thursday, July 18, 2024

Mona Kookesh, who’s been living in her vehicle for the past couple of months, says she can use help with legal issues, housing assistance and other services to get her back into a stable situation. On Thursday afternoon she was parked next door to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a building with a multitude of agencies whose missions are to help people in need.

The Teal Street Center, where many programs have been operating for the past year, hosted the event attended by about 50 community leaders to recognize the completion of interior and exterior work on a $10 million facility first envisioned more than 20 years ago.

Kookesh, who said her only experience with Teal Street Center so far is getting a trespass notice when she tried to park there, stated she and her boyfriend were approved for housing assistance last year, but so far they haven’t received any. She said help resolving that issue is one of the things she would like to get help with at the center.

“There’s like so many housing grants out there like right now they’re supposed to be giving out, but (it seems like) nobody is receiving them,” she said.

There are nine agencies in the Teal Street Center, including two providing legal assistance — Alaska Legal Services for low-income residents and the Disability Law Center of Alaska. The other agencies are AWARE which provides support services for victims of domestic or sexual violence; Southeast Alaska Independent Living (SAIL) which provides services and equipment to the elderly and people with disabilities; Cancer Connection; National Alliance on Mental Illness; Juneau Suicide Prevention Coalition; and United Way of Southeast Alaska.

The center is located between the Glory Hall shelter which provides food and shelter for people experiencing homelessness, and St Vincent de Paul Juneau which provides transitional housing and other assistance to people in need. Mariya Lovishchuk, executive director of the Glory Hall, said having the collection of social service facilities in close proximity is to a large extent proving successful.

“It is amazing to have an emergency shelter next to a center that is full of providers,” she said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony. She called it a “huge experiment” where “one of the most amazing things that have happened here is when we have people in crisis, we can divert them through our partners right next door. The concept of the warm handoff has really been working.”

But there are “things that are not working,” Lovishchuk said. She asked the audience to observe a moment of silence for Steven Kissack, a longtime homeless Juneau resident who was killed in a confrontation with police on Monday, and said more needs to be done to help others in his situation.

“Definitely there has been more of an impact on this neighborhood since this shelter has been here,” she said. As such, providers and others working in the area are seeing firsthand that issues such as “disorders, addiction, and just not enough treatment and mental health services continue to plague us.”

The Teal Street Center has provided services to more than 3,000 people during the past year, said Sara Chapell, the facility’s campaign coordinator, in an interview after the ceremony. But she emphasized the center’s purpose isn’t “for folks who are experiencing chronic homelessness…it’s more folks who are that kind of at risk of going in that direction.”

“A good example for SAIL is we have an aging and disability resource center,” she said. “We would sit down with somebody who maybe needed medical services, or help with living in their home and staying in their home. Folks who may qualify for permanent disability or Social Security disability who haven’t qualified yet come up to SAIL so that we can get them on that path to get them the benefits that they deserve. That makes it less likely that they’re going to end up out on the street.”

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.