Among the many ordinary old houses on a Seattle street, the Providence Hospitality House (PHH) looks average. With a blooming garden in the front yard and children’s artwork decorating the windows, PHH claims its distinctiveness through the community of strong, supportive women and children that inhabit it.

PHH, an emergency shelter for women with children in crisis, was founded by the Sisters of Providence in 1979 when Sister Kay Van Stralen recognized the need for emergency housing for women and children in the Seattle area. The house, located on Capitol Hill, has been a home for more than 1,200 women and more than 1,900 children.

Serving as a stepping stone for families in need, the families residing in the shelter stay for six to eight weeks, moving to transitional or permanent housing from there.

“There’s not one reason for homelessness,” said Megan McArthur, director of PHH. “We see refugees, immigrants, women who have dealt with domestic violence, generational money issues; it can be any number of things — usually a mixture of things.”

The house is run by McArthur and four staff, referred to as “team members,” who do case and house management. The team members work and sleep in the house in 24-hour shifts to be constantly available to the residents.

In order to protect the staff and residents, the PHH phone number is unlisted, and there are no signs indicating that the house is a shelter. As safe as that seems, the staff is small in number, and many of the employees are young, therefore PHH does not take in women coming straight from domestic-violence situations as they cannot provide the in-house therapy or security needed for women.

UW senior Tori Mueller has been a PHH team member for about three years and loves her work so much that she can’t see an end to it anytime soon.

“There are countless benefits,” Mueller said. “In high school, we were required to do community service, and from then, it kind of stuck with me. This basic human desire stuck with me to help someone who may not have as much as you.”

There are also many student volunteers from Seattle University and the UW who come for two-hour shifts to do housework, but most time is spent playing with the kids.

“It’s not a chore; it’s like a privilege to help around the house,” said Stephen Gannon, a UW junior who has been a volunteer for PHH for about two years.

Mueller and Gannon shared some frustrations regarding working at the shelter and having to go back to school, where they believe many students live “in a bubble.”

“I think the hardest part about this job is that I’m still working on my undergrad degree,” Mueller said. “There have been a couple of night shifts that have been really hard to deal with emotionally. Then, the next day, I have to go to class, feeling angry with the other students because, when my mind is on what happened at the shelter, their mind is on what was on TV that day.”

Gannon nodded in agreement, adding: “I think a good analogy for this would be like the clouds clearing and seeing the mountains behind the clouds, and when the clouds go back, you still know the mountains are there. You can argue that a lot of people are still speculating as to what’s behind the clouds.”

The staff and volunteers also take pride in the fact that PHH is not like most shelters, as the house only holds up to three women and eight children at one time.

“We don’t focus on the number of people that we serve, but the quality of service we give to the people who are here,” Mueller said.

With various house activities, such as craft night and communal dinner every night at 5:30, the PHH staff tries to build a community for women who may not feel it elsewhere.

“At first, I was like, ‘I have to share one bathroom with all of these women,’ but now I love it,” said Fadumo*, who has been living in the house for two weeks with her 7-month-old baby, as she lounged on the family-room couch after a long day playing in the sun. “It is my home, and I love Tori; I love all of the staff.”

The house also has productivity hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., when the moms are required to leave PHH. This is in order to stave off depression and motivate the moms to get involved with things, such as jobs or meetings, explained McArthur, emphasizing the foundation that PHH tries to foster so the women can build a productive lifestyle.

Along with the community built between the families in the house, the staff is also very supportive of one another.

“The hardest situation I’ve had to deal with was when I had to ask a mom to leave because she had broken several of the house rules. She had been in the house for four weeks, and she had two daughters, and I had become very attached to them,” Mueller said. “But one of the hardest things about this job is having to be the bad guy in a lot of situations. And in this situation, she told the kids that I was making them go and that it was my decision.”

When dealing with situations such as these, Mueller and McArthur emphasized the importance of conversation between the staff members and the high level of support shared throughout the house.

“I will never go home and not know that my team members [are] behind me,” Mueller said.

The house is supported by a grant from the Moyer Foundation, along with donations from different organizations and services from student groups.

For college students, Mueller emphasized the benefits of working at PHH. As the house is nonprofit, they have an active board, allowing the student-workers to gain experience with the corporate side of nonprofit work.

Also, as many students are more accustomed to group community service where all of the work is normally the same, Mueller sees PHH as a different kind of community-service opportunity.

“I’d definitely recommend this because there are so many different areas of service [at PHH],” said Mueller. “When kids are forced to do it, they go in a group, but there’s so many different aspects of community service, so many different tunnels and holes and avenues in a way that might make you want to keep doing it — a productive project.”

Reach copy chief Parisa Sadrzadeh at features@dailyuw.com.

*Last name omitted for privacy reasons.