Kids staying at this family homeless shelter facility now have a place to play

South Salt Lake Mayor Cherie Wood and Laurie Hopkins, director of Shelter the Homeless, a nonprofit that owns several homeless shelter facilities in Utah, laughed as they both took a ride down the slides at a new playground installed behind an old Motel 6 that has been converted into a shelter facility for homeless families. 

Wood, Hopkins and other leaders held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday for the new playground at the Family Interim Non-Congregate Housing Facility — FINCH for short. 

Many families have a backyard for their kids to play in — but not those living at the FINCH, which offers private remodeled motel rooms for families experiencing homelessness. That’s what was missing, Hopkins said. 

“In order for kids to really feel like they are in a home environment, they do need a place to get their wiggles out. They need a place to be able to have fun and play … and the parents need a respite too,” Hopkins said. “So I do think that it is actually a critical piece of this entire property to really have a place to recreate.” 

The playground opening comes about a year after the FINCH opened last year, when it was lauded as filling a long overdue need in Utah’s homeless system. Until then, the 300-bed Connie Crosby Family Resource Center in Midvale had been the only emergency shelter in the state exclusively for families with children, and shelters faced waitlists of upwards of 75 families at a time needing emergency shelter. 

Once a Motel 6, Utah’s long-awaited family shelter is about to open

Since its opening, the FINCH has housed about 125 families to date, Hopkins said. But she also said it’s become more than a noncongregate shelter. 

“What it has developed into is really a big resource for families to heal, for families to find work, for families to find their homes, for the kids to be able to stay in school,” she said.

The playground cost about $150,000, Hopkins said. About a third of it was financed through donations by Shelter the Homeless. The rest, she said, came through HomeAid, an organization devoted to helping people experiencing homelessness “build new lives through construction, community engagement and education,” according to its website. 

HomeAid brought “a lot of in-kind donations, goods and services” to make the playground possible, Hopkins said. 

“By doing it through this partnership, we were able to do it much more quickly,” Hopkins said, noting that the patch of land was “weeds and junk trees not too long ago.” She initially thought the playground project would take several years, but because of HomeAid she said it became possible much sooner. 

Ahead of the ribbon cutting, Lisa Wright, executive director of HomeAid, said the FINCH acronym has personal meaning and symbolism to her. Growing up, she said her dad put dozens of bird feeders in their backyard, and every summer they’d watch “beautiful, bright yellow gold finches” flit around their feeders. 

“Some of the symbolism of a finch is their resilience and adaptability,” Wright said. “And I think that’s so fitting for this shelter here, that every mother and father and child who is here is living that every day.” 

Finches, she said, also symbolize “joy — and that was something that this shelter needed.”

“As a mother, there is nothing more joyful than watching your children play outside, in the outdoors, and having fun and laughing. And the families and the children, this is what they needed. This is what we wanted to bring, to bring more joy to the families here.” 

Wood expressed gratitude for the partners who made the playground possible, while saying South Salt Lake is “proud” to host the FINCH facility because it helps ensure kids have a roof over their head. 

“It’s one thing to have a safe space, but it’s also another thing to provide a space where kids can be kids and forget about all of the other issues that they’re dealing with,” she said. “This may seem simple, but it’s so huge.”

Michelle Flynn, executive director of The Road Home, which operates the FINCH, said the biggest challenge facing the facility currently is finding alternative or affordable housing to transition families out of emergency shelter. 

“(Staff say) our families just aren’t making enough money for the housing market right now. We’ve got to find more subsidies and those kinds of things,” she said. “That’s why the families are staying longer.” 

Many of the 125 families FINCH has helped over the past year have been able to find other types of housing, but some remain with nowhere else to go, Flynn said. 

“Having FINCH open has absolutely allowed us to not turn a family away,” she said. “That was our core goal, and we have achieved that. That alone is amazing.”