Pierce County’s first-ever homeless shelter access hub recently secured funding to continue its services for at least two years.
Before 2024, Pierce County never had a centralized place for people in need of shelter to go. There was no 24/7 hotline for families to call anytime they were facing homelessness.
That was the problem Family Promise of Puget Sound was trying to solve.
In fall 2024, the organization leased a floor of an old school building at 12108 Pacific Ave S. in Parkland through a $1 million Homeless Shelter Access Hub grant awarded by the county.
Recently, Pierce County Human Services reported awarding an additional grant to sustain the operation for the foreseeable future.
“The Pierce County Shelter Access Hub is a cornerstone of our Unified Regional Approach to ending homelessness,” Pierce County Human Services director Gary Gant told The News Tribune in a statement regarding the award. “By serving approximately 2,700 households annually and providing a 24/7 central point of contact, we are successfully reducing fragmentation in our system.”
Steve Decker is the CEO of Family Promise of Puget Sound. In an interview with The News Tribune, Decker said his organization had been awarded a grant of $1.1 million from the county to sustain the shelter access hub for another two years.
He said the county will have the option to award an additional $1.1 million to continue the program for another two years if it deems it necessary.
Decker said the up to four years of funding is “big news” for a service provider as the county typically only awards grants to sustain programs for one or two years — making long-term planning difficult for nonprofits which depend on grant funding to hire staff and expand programs.
“This will allow dependable access to services for everyone in need,” Decker said.
He also said the grant would allow the shelter-access hub to provide something it has previously been unable to offer: crisis assessment and case management.
Decker said the hub previously was funded and tasked with pointing people in the direction of available shelter beds and “wish them good luck.”
With the new grant, the organization is planning to provide case managers to assess the needs and challenges of each individual and household who comes to the hub for help.
Decker said they will be able to create a “7-day plan” and be more proactive in getting families and individuals permanently off the streets instead of reactively referring them to an emergency shelter and hoping for the best.
That could include organizing child care while a parent goes to work or scheduling an appointment with a Coordinated Entry intake specialist.
“Overall, the new procurement refines the model to strengthen coordination across the homelessness-response system while maintaining the core goal of quickly connecting people to available shelter beds,” Pierce County spokesperson Kari Moore told The News Tribune in an email.
When asked what Family Promise of Puget Sound has learned since opening the hub, Decker said his organization did not anticipate the “number of people in desperate need.”
In the nearly 20 months the hub has been operating, it had been contacted by more than 5,000 different households that were facing imminent homelessness or were already unhoused, Decker said.
Decker said these numbers far exceed the expectations set by the county’s data and the annual survey of those living unhoused in the region, which counted 2,955 individuals on a single night in 2025.
Family Promise of Puget Sound collects and reports detailed metrics on the demographics they serve and the outcomes of their service. Decker said the data can help to understand the trends of the homelessness crisis and can be used to forecast seasonal shelter needs.
This article was first published by the Tacoma News Tribune through the Murrow News Fellow program, managed by Washington State University.
