Women’s Lunch Place: Mission and Need
Mission:
Women’s Lunch Place inspires hope and supports the development of self-sustaining skills for women experiencing hunger, homelessness, and poverty. We create a safe, welcoming day shelter community in which we respect the dignity of our guests. We build trusting relationships to provide individualized, integrated services focused on nutrition, health, housing, and economic empowerment.
See how we accomplished these goals in our Year-End Report.
Vision:
In the effort to eradicate hunger, homelessness, and poverty among women, Women’s Lunch Place is a visionary, collaborative leader and partner in Greater Boston. With a unique, relationship-driven service model, we provide women with a path to self-sufficiency, improved health, housing, and financial stability.
Core Values:
We believe that no individual should have to be hungry or homeless.
We believe all human beings should be treated with dignity and respect.
We meet each woman where she is, and we base and adjust our services according to her needs.
We offer services in a comfortable and safe community providing physical and emotional sustenance.
We create a community of understanding and acceptance among guests, staff, volunteers, and board members.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion:
Honoring and supporting individual journeys to empowerment and stability is central to the mission of Women’s Lunch Place. WLP achieves its greatest impact by embracing diverse perspectives and experiences, enriched by the variety of races, cultures, and lived experiences within its community.
WLP’s shelter programs and collaborations improve access to housing and healthcare for its majority-minority population; WLP designs programming and develops partnerships to equitably address the specific needs of women of color. WLP’s service model centers racial equity, embeds behavioral health supports, and is focused on the unique needs of underserved women.
WLP is committed to evaluating the impact of its programs through the lens of equity in an annual Program Evaluation. Data includes feedback received in a formal guest survey and information from a database on participation in programming, services accessed, outputs, and outcomes. All data is analyzed by race to ensure outcomes are aligned with WLP’s equity goals.
In a housing market layered with disadvantages for people of color, WLP finds success equitably. The women WLP has housed from homelessness over the past three years are majority non-white. Because WLP’s guest population is majority comprised of women of color, its work in helping them achieve their goals often revolves around navigating deeply embedded inequalities in the housing, healthcare, and justice systems.
The executive team is committed to the implementation of equity-based policies and benefits, hiring diverse talent, and investing in professional development. High retention rates are a telling gauge that staff appreciates WLP’s focus on building a workplace that is equitable and safe, with intentionally developed professional growth plans. Additionally, WLP’s staff succession plan includes women of color identified as future directors. WLP ensures they attend training and leadership development opportunities to support their development.
The WLP Board of Directors recognizes its duty to recruit a membership that reflects the diversity of the community WLP serves while ensuring the Board has broad expertise to consult and guide the executive team and the ability to network and advocate for the financial resources needed to execute its mission.
Our Guests:
Over the course of a year, Women's Lunch Place serves over 2,200 individual women experiencing homelessness and poverty from the Greater Boston area. Some women come infrequently, while others visit almost daily. Women’s Lunch Place primarily serves women from the following counties: Suffolk, Middlesex, Essex, and Norfolk. WLP’s ethnically diverse guest population is 68% women of color (47% Black, 10% multi-racial, 3% Asian, and 8% other) and 32% white, with 24% identify themselves as Latina. Guests at WLP include immigrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Activity at WLP reflects the rising number of unhoused women. WLP’s data shows that 35% of women served last year were new. With that level of turnover comes destabilizing factors. Building trust and a sense of belonging is a gradual process, and WLP continually adapts to meet the evolving needs of its guests.
WLP welcomes all guests who identify as women. They have intersecting vulnerabilities––many suffer from debilitating mental illness, are struggling with or recovering from substance use disorders, or have chronic and/or acute physical ailments. WLP serves women from generations of poverty who are chronically homeless and others with college degrees who are in crisis for reasons ranging from divorce and domestic violence to forced retirement or mental health issues.
Some of WLP’s homeless guests stay in emergency shelters where a limited number of beds are allocated for women; others are frightened or distrustful of those institutions and spend their nights outside. Many guests are insecurely housed, pushing them into impossible choices every day––they are often unable to afford food, personal hygiene supplies, and other critical items after they have paid rent. Most of these women live in neighborhoods that have been hit hardest by healthcare, racial, and gender disparities.
These additional statistics reveal a population in crisis and highlight the strength of WLP’s community:
64% rely on WLP for most of their meals
67% are over 50 years old
57% are homeless
69% have trauma and/or violence in their histories
78% have mental health issues
77% are unemployed
Guests bring a range of talents and personalities to Women’s Lunch Place. They are resilient. WLP has witnessed countless acts of kindness from one guest to another––a phenomenal talent show performance, encouragement to join an activity, or a quiet pat on the shoulder to acknowledge understanding and support. Together with staff and volunteers, they form the unique and diverse community of Women’s Lunch Place.
Our Need:
In the landscape of homelessness and human services, women’s voices are not being heard. Women and girls comprise the majority of people living in poverty in the U.S., yet only 1.8% of all philanthropic dollars support initiatives are designed to improve and stabilize their lives. Moreover, “The social construction of gender and its impact on the health of marginalized women, especially women who experience homelessness within urban settings, is frequently overlooked. Housing research, programs, and policies too often fail to utilize gender redistributive frameworks—perpetuating gendered harm for many.”
Intimate partner violence is the leading cause of women's homelessness. Studies reveal that 90% of homeless women have experienced trauma from physical or sexual abuse, rape, intimate partner violence, trafficking, and childhood sexual/physical abuse, which has profound effects on cognition, trust, and health. Women experiencing homelessness have unique needs, which stem from having higher rates of diagnosed mental health issues, suicidal thoughts and attempts, and childhood trauma than their male counterparts. Researchers have found that women-specific services are more effective at addressing a history of trauma and mental health issues in combination with substance misuse than those that do not take gender into account.
Taken together, these studies underscore the urgency of moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach where housing and supportive services largely ignore gender. The research suggests a clear best practice––developing tailored solutions and recovery programming that successfully address the specific needs of women who have histories of discrimination, abuse, and violence. When women have histories of violence and co/tri morbidities, crises often occur, especially before recovery. Experts believe that the goal of trauma-informed crisis intervention is to allow the woman to retain as much control as possible by working with the woman to plan for a crisis before it occurs and allowing her to make her wishes known. This is precisely the type of intervention work that WLP excels in.
Homelessness, hunger, and health inequities are inextricably linked, leading to an increased risk of premature mortality and other serious health-related issues for guests. Last year, one in three Massachusetts households experienced food insecurity. Most of those households had to choose between paying for food or utilities, rent, and medical care. Those receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits and utilizing food pantries were twice as likely to report anxiety and depression.
Minority communities have been severely affected by a lack of access to healthy nutrition, affordable housing, quality health care and education, and living wage jobs. Neighborhood, income, education, discrimination, and environment all affect disease risk, lifelong health, and economic empowerment. Factors like these, which are known as Social Determinants of Health, have a significant impact on well-being and lifespan. Through innovative programming, WLP increases access to the Social Determinants of Health for its majority-minority community, providing pathways to health and stability and reducing racial inequities in the process.
HOMELESSNESS AND HOUSING CRISES IN GREATER BOSTON
Greater Boston has the second-highest per capita homelessness rate out of the 45 largest cities or Continuums of Care in the country. Boston was only behind New York City, with 801 homeless per 100,000 residents. (New York’s rate is 1,056 homeless per 100,000 residents.)
In Massachusetts, 8,610 women were reported to be experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023, a marked increase from the year prior.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that there is currently a need for over 170,000 more affordable rental units in Metro Boston.
A worker earning the state’s $15-an-hour minimum wage would need to work 119 hours per week in order to afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent in the Boston metro area.
The shortage crisis creates remarkably long wait times for vouchers and affordable units. Per the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, people with housing choice vouchers in Massachusetts typically spend four years on the waitlist before they secure housing.
Women who are fortunate enough to be housed from homelessness face still an uphill battle to remain stable. Individualized care management, physical and behavioral health care, recovery programming, material assistance, and connections to the surrounding community all increase the probability that they remain safe and anchored in their new homes. Many are working to overcome addiction and mental health issues. Yet Boston has notably few options for safe, low-threshold drop-in spaces, shelter, or housing that is directly supportive of their needs. Women’s Lunch Place combats this service gap through its Housing & Stabilization Program, which has had a 97% success rate since its inception in 2020.
The effects of the gap in gender-specific services can continue to be seen at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard (known colloquially as Mass. and Cass). Despite concerted efforts to clear the area, it remains a hotspot for drug and human traffickers, abusers, and predators. Women in this area are particularly vulnerable to these dangers. The Boston Homeless Women’s Committee, comprised of leading service providers from across the city, has created recommendations that acknowledge the immense mental health and safety barriers that these women are facing. It is a critical moment in time––shelter capacity for women has decreased as the latest point-in-time counts show the number of homeless women is increasing.