Maggie’s Place provides safe housing for homeless pregnant women

PHOENIX — Homelessness is on the rise and there’s an organization in the Valley that caters specifically to women who are pregnant.

Maggie’s Place offers a support system to pregnant women who are experiencing homelessness during a critical time. In addition to housing, they provide food, infant supplies, access to medical care and programs.

The organization has homes throughout the Valley, including Mesa, Tempe, Phoenix and Glendale with a new maternity home, The Gabriel Home, opening in the far West Valley.

“Maggie’s Place provides a loving home and a supportive community moms move in any point that they’re pregnant so she could be six weeks or she’s delivering tomorrow and we’re driving to the hospital,” Whitney Thistle, vice president of Maggie’s Place said in an interview with KTAR News 92.3 FM. “She is able to move into our homes, be welcomed with love and community, obviously, resources.”

Women are able to stay in the home for up to a year after the baby is born.

Even though homelessness numbers have risen throughout the Valley, Thistle said they have always been at capacity and have a very high number of intake opportunities.

“We have about 50 to 70 calls a week of women who would qualify for our program that we’re unable to serve because we’re full,” she said. “So not necessarily an uptick but just a regular high
volume, which really led us to expanding and offering more bed nights for moms and needs during uh two expansion projects.”

Thistle said families and pregnant women are really the hidden homeless.

“It’s an array of complicated circumstances that lead someone to the journey to the doors of Maggie’s place, whether they’re displaced, you know, they’re not in their home state,” she said.  “Whether it’s a relationship that’s gone south and they thought they had a partner and no longer do um also substance abuse and we support our moms um in that long term recovery process.”

Over 1,100 women lived in a Maggie’s Place home and had a baby, Thistle said.

“So not only are we, you know, serving our moms in our maternity homes, but we also have a beautiful robust community of alumni moms who still come back to us uh for services,” she said. “Two years, five years, 10 years later. So our goal is to be involved with mom as long as she’ll have us. We say once, a Maggie’s Place mom, always a Maggie’s Place mom.”

To learn more about Maggie’s Place or how to get involved with the organization, click here.

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