Today I went and visited the Bastrop and Austin women's shelters with my coworkers. It was very interesting. We are looking at different shelters in the area to get some ideas about our own brand spankin new shelter we are going to build in the next year. Bastrop's shelter is very similar to our shelter in san marcos, accept for the transitional housing that they have. It is so cool. After staying in the shelter for up to 2 months clients can move into transitional housing which is income based. It is basically apartments, efficienties, 1 and 2 bedroom . They can stay there for up to two years. Man that is just the neatest thing. Women that leave abusive situations often have a lot of obsticles in front of them. The advocate said that most of the time they aren't all the way full. Now the transitional housing in austin is always full. It is much harder to get in. you kinda have to be in the right place at the right time.

The austin shelter is huge. It has two stories and what they call clusters. A cluster is a group of 5 families that each share a kitchen and living area and 2 or 3 bathrooms. In smaller shelters everyone shares 1 kitchen living area and several baths. They also provided services like medical and dental. They have a grant that pays for doctors to come on campus once a week. This is especially nice for clients that have phycological issues because the doctor can proscribe meds. It takes a while to get into shole creek and emergancy rooms aren't a good source of continual care. This way theoredically a doctor can see this person once a week for a month or two. That is amazing. Not to mention the dental care for children. Lets face it medical care is so exspensive for everyone. I was very impressed with this. In San antonio they also have this service available, but even non residential clients qualify.

San antonio was a huge shelter. THey have a school on campus, computer labs, medical care, play area that opened to a playground and transitional housing. The security at all of these shelters are incredible.

My favorite thing about New Braunfels was they housed client's animals and men. Both are not the norm at shelters.

Our shelter is older than the others. It is open and homey. We have room for improvement and by looking at these other places we will be the best in Texas. In comparision to these other shelters I think our security could use some improvements, but the way our rooms are set up suite style with a bath in between each room and lots of open space is better than the other shelters.

That is just some ramblings....