Safe Stays by ReloShare partners with hotels nationwide to protect survivors’ identities and expand access to secure housing.
Safe Stays by ReloShare is revolutionizing how vulnerable populations find safe shelter—using an anonymized hotel booking system that protects privacy and security. Ms. spoke with Paige Allmendinger, the company’s chief product officer, about how it works.
Safe Stays by ReloShare grew from a small pilot in Chicago in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, to a program that today serves 800+ agencies across the U.S. and supports tens of thousands of reservations each year. Reloshare recently launched its No Room to Dream campaign, highlighting the childhood homelessness crisis and the urgency of fast, anonymous placements.
During the pandemic, calls to domestic violence hotlines spiked, as a result of this “pandemic within a pandemic,” with reported increases in the severity of injuries. As an essential service, domestic violence shelters remained open; however, the increase in demand coupled with social distancing requirements, resulted in a “state of emergency” for the shelter system—a crisis playing out again in the wake of the current government shutdown, leaving shelters and hotlines with limited resources to stay staffed and open.
Powerfully and painfully capturing this reality, Faith Power, director of the Laurel Center, a domestic violence shelter in Winchester, Virginia, recounted to The Washington Post what kept her awake at night: She envisioned a woman “with bruises on her arms, two kids in the back seat, and a bag stuffed with anything she could grab” who was “driving around with nowhere to go” having been told there were no available beds.
Before joining ReloShare, Paige Allmendinger was the deputy chief for victim services in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. During the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Allmendinger launched a program that placed 20 families in apartments as expanded domestic violence housing, but there were many more survivors that needed shelter and virtually no shelter beds available in the city.
At the same time, the pandemic was also having an unwelcome impact on ReloShare, a new corporate housing company to provide temporary furnished housing units to business travelers and relocating employees. ReloShare launched just as the pandemic was shutting down travel, which threatened to sink the company. Pivoting, the co-founders inaugurated a pilot project in Chicago to provide temporary housing to domestic violence survivors in vacant corporate housing units.
From San Francisco, Allmendinger learned of the Chicago pilot and facilitated a second pilot locally, adapting ReloShare’s platform to shelter survivors. In 2021, she joined the company to lead Safe Stays, seeing the potential for ReloShare to address a nationwide need for accessible, streamlined and convenient options for emergency shelter by merging for-profit tools with social service challenges.
In her previous roles at the District Attorney’s Office, as a homelessness case worker, and as a domestic violence advocate in Washington, D.C., Allmendinger and other providers had long relied on hotels for survivor housing across metro, suburban and rural communities.
The challenge was scalability and safety: There was no national program that made it simple for providers to book rooms with consistent protections for survivors.
Most agencies had to cultivate one-off hotel partnerships, negotiate terms and safety measures individually, and were often limited to just one or two willing hotels. Some shelters had begun using hotels as temporary emergency housing during the pandemic, but as they were aware, this was not without risk.
The safety gaps of partnering with hotels were clearly evident to those in the field. As Ruth Glenn, the former chief executive and president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence told The Washington Post, “When guests check in, hotel staff often insist on seeing their identification and recording their full name. Because hotel staff members are not trained advocates, she said, they probably won’t be on high alert if an abuser calls or walks through the door.”
These concerns were heightened by the fact that “leaving is often the most dangerous time for survivors of abuse,” according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and abusers “may escalate their abusive tactics” in the post-separation period.
“They’ll do anything,” Glenn said. “They’ll call the hotel, call family and relatives, drive across state lines. When they’re escalating, nothing is outside of the realm of possibility.”
Acutely aware of the risks, alongside ReloShare co-founders Matt Singley and John Moats, Allmendinger began exploring whether hotel brands would partner to create a nationwide network and a new kind of trauma-informed booking process. Allmendinger told Ms.:
“Initially, we wanted to see if hotel brands would be willing to allow reservations to be booked with core safety provisions that would make it safer and easier for agencies to place survivors. First, we needed the ability for a guest to check in under a fake name, with no ID required at check-in. If the survivor’s real name isn’t tied to the reservation and an abuser calls the hotel searching for them, there won’t be any record that the survivor is in-house, giving the survivor a degree of protection at the very time they need it most.
“Second, we needed hotels to forego the usual requirement for a credit card from the guest or agency at check-in. Credit-card transactions can expose location putting survivors at risk. While social service organizations may have funding to pay for hotel stays, many have limited credit lines for upfront payment or can’t send staff in person to present a card at check-in.”
Getting buy-in from several major hotel brands, such as Choice Hotels (Comfort Inn & Suites and others) in August of 2021, Safe Stays by ReloShare launched its pioneering hotel booking platform that provides anonymity by enabling agencies to book hotel rooms for their clients using a “fake name.” Safe Stays maintains a live team 24/7 that is accessible to hotels and agencies to triage concerns and coordinate safety checks.
To further protect the safety and identity of guests checking in, Allmendinger highlighted, “We’ve learned there can be unintended consequences if a hotel knows a guest is a trafficking or domestic violence survivor. Rather than naming which social service organization booked the hotel stay, every reservation simply appears as a ReloShare reservation, adding a layer of anonymity for both the agency and the guest.”
At the same time, however, by checking in as a ReloShare reservation, hotel staff “understand that folks may be coming in crisis … and may need some additional support when they get there” without needing to know the specifics of their situation. Hotel managers and front desk staff are provided with a short training video to help them respond effectively to guests who may be experiencing trauma with the goal of “building a hotel environment that prioritizes empathy and understanding.”
While Safe Stays began as a domestic violence response, the platform now serves a wide array of social service providers, such as legal aid groups, trafficking-response teams, youth and family services and culturally specific organizations.
As Allmendinger highlighted, “We’ve seen significant growth among nonprofits that provide case management for specific communities, including LGBTQ+ people. … Many don’t run shelters or have funding to build them, but their clients still need emergency housing.”
Today, ReloShare partners with more than 20,000 hotels nationwide, including nearly 4,000 that participate in their “Alias” program, across all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico (as of this month).
But as Allmendinger stressed, “access remains limited to vetted nonprofits and government agencies, which must provide ongoing services during a client’s stay, guardrails that keep placements survivor-centered and accountable.”
Recognizing that the lack of funds is a major barrier for many agencies, Allmendinger and her staff have become what she refers to as “unofficial technical assistance providers.” In this capacity, they do grant sourcing, write letters of support and “advise on program design, budgeting, and grant writing.”
Ms. also talked to Megan Mattimoe, the founder and direction of Advocating Opportunity, which provides “comprehensive, holistic, trauma-responsive legal and support services to persons who have experienced sex and labor trafficking,” and prioritizes finding victims a “safe place to stay [as] the first step” in building resiliency about the agency’s use of Safe Stays. As she stressed, being able to put their clients “in a hotel with an anonymous name is a huge deal. It gives them security. It gives them privacy. It gives them a sense of safety. … Then they can start to calm down enough to get what they need, get the things that they need and move forward.”
Ms. also spoke with the team from the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence, comprised of Tyler Uker-Laudermann, Jazmin Vera, and Nicole Colvin. The OAESV is the state’s rape crises and prevention coalition, which works with Safe Stays as part of their Meaningful Housing Access Program. They likewise stressed the value to their clients of having a safe place to stay if they “have had to flee for safety or … get away from the trauma for a little bit.” They emphasized that “sometimes it is lifesaving, and oftentimes its life changing … for sexual violence survivors … truly how absolutely beneficial even a few days in the hotel can be.”
As we wrapped our conversation, Ms. asked Allmendinger if there was anything else she wished to share. She replied, “Every person in crisis deserves safe, dignified emergency housing. Our goal is to make sure every agency—large or small—can quickly and confidentially provide safe options to every person who reaches out.”
Great Job Shoshanna Ehrlich & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
