Housing Secretary Visits Pittsfield's 'The First'
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Just five months after opening, The First has already become a community hub for individuals in need of resources or a place to decompress.
The space is filled with donated items from a room full of clothing, lockers, a classroom, couches, a television, a ping-pong table, and more.
Located at 74 First St., the resource center is open Tuesday through Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
"[Visitors] come up to us daily and admit that this is a beautiful space, and we want to keep it in the community as a whole… It's a wonderful place for them to feel as part of the community," The First Program Director, John Jablonski, said.
The First was one of the stops on Housing Secretary Juana Matias' tour of supportive housing initiatives in Pittsfield. In February, she was appointed to lead the state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
The schedule also included tours of the former St. Joseph's High School building and Wright Block Residences.
"We're working really collaboratively. [Local officials are] trying to dismantle bottlenecks that exist for housing production, and that's what we want to see across the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts," Matias said.
"So, this is a perfect model of the partnerships we want to see, and we love coming to the ground and seeing how people are leveraging public taxpayer dollars to help address the issue over time, which is housing production."
The First's housing resource center opened its doors in February and since then has become a lively environment where individuals struggling with housing can freshen up in the showers, eat, and rest from having to spend nights outside.
The center sees more than 50 people come through to use its resources, Jablonski said.
The housing resource center is funded by Pittsfield's American Rescue Plan Act dollars and is located in the basement of the Zion Lutheran Church.
During the tour of The First, Erin Forbush, ServiceNet's director of shelter and housing, explained to Matias that community is also a need for the demographic that The First serves.
The organization works to remove barriers people face by avoiding restrictive use requirements and only asking visitors to sign in with their names, officials said.
Forbush reported that the lockers have been one of the center's major advantages, allowing unhoused people to store important documentation or belongings. They hope to build a community and relationship with visitors and evolve from there by providing additional resources to get them back on their feet.
The visitors are excited about sharing each other's cultures when they mingle in the center, Forbush said.
In addition to the center, the facility also has nine permanent supportive studios upstairs as part of an initiative that added 40 permanent supportive housing units to the city.
The Healey-Driscoll Administration's "A Home for Everyone: A Comprehensive Housing Plan for Massachusetts" found that more than 220,000 homes must be built in the next decade to meet housing needs.
Tags: affordable housing,
