North Hollywood : Homeless Advocates at Home in Former Cafe

At one time, the building at 6040 Vineland Ave. was a restaurant called the Silvermoon Cafe.

Now it is a place where homeless Valley women and children can get a hot meal, a shower and clean clothes.

For $235,000, the building was bought by the Women’s Care Cottage and renovated for $119,000 to become a new resource center for the homeless advocacy group.

The two-story building with 3,000 square feet of space replaces a cramped facility in Van Nuys.

“We were doing intakes on the steps of the porch,” said Cynthia Caughey, executive director of the Women’s Care Cottage, which also runs a shelter in North Hollywood. “We were holding parenting classes in a storage room where we kept our diapers and our clothing.”

The new resource center held a grand opening last week. The staff had been using the smaller, 700-square-foot building for 10 years. Caughey said the search for a new building started two years ago, when they realized how the population of homeless women they were helping had grown.

“We used to see a couple hundred people [a year],” said Women’s Care Cottage development associate Jenny Lehr. “Now we see a couple thousand plus. We have a segment of society called the ‘new poor’ . . . who are coming here in growing numbers.”

Caughey said the Women’s Care Cottage sees as many as four new homeless families a day and about 2,000 clients a year.

The Women’s Care Cottage resource center bought the white stucco building with blue awnings and cheery peach-painted rooms with a loan from the nonprofit Low-Income Housing Fund, Lehr said. Donations from private foundations paid for the renovation.

On the second floor of the building, a vocational counseling center for the cottage’s clients is planned to open in the spring.

The resource center also gives out bags of food to clients and lets them use shower and laundry facilities, get phone messages and mail and receive bus tickets and taxi vouchers.

For more information about donations, call (818) 753-4850.