Natural Allah is helping families move back home

The Mary’s Place Housing Team partners with families to overcome barriers to housing and help them move from shelter to a home. Housing Manager, Natural Allah, oversees Housing Specialists who connect with community partners to identify resources and housing solutions that work for each family’s unique needs. 

“One of the biggest barriers to housing we see is eviction debt,” says Natural, “unfortunately, many of our families have accumulated large debt resulting in eviction and finding themselves unhoused. Those debts must be paid down before they can apply for new housing. We work with the family and partner organizations to eliminate debt and remove that barrier.” Some families accumulate housing debt and lose their homes because of layoffs or medical expenses; others work multiple jobs and still face a gap between their income and basic expenses. The Mary’s Place Housing Team uses flexible funding and community partnerships to help families access more sustainable housing solutions.  

Natural and his team work with many families who’ve migrated to the United States and are seeking asylum. Immigration systems can be challenging for families to navigate as they adjust to an unfamiliar culture, face language barriers, and process trauma that led them to flee their home countries. In these cases, the team leans on relationships with community organizations and state agencies to help families through the legal immigration process and gain access to the necessary documentation and funds to obtain housing, stability, and employment. 

“We had one family in particular that fled from violence in The Democratic Republic of the Congo,” shares Natural. The family escaped to Angola, where refugee centers are overcrowded and tensions are high. From there, they came to the United States and eventually made their way to Seattle, where they’re seeking asylum. “We looked at all of the trauma this family went through to get here and took that into consideration in our approach,” says Natural. Natural and his team used a trauma-informed approach to work with this family and were able to connect them with immigration resources and, ultimately a housing solution! “It was a big thing for us,” shares Natural. 

The feeling he gets when a family moves out of shelter into safe, stable housing is Natural’s favorite thing about working at Mary’s Place. “We have families who come here and they’re feeling defeated,” says Natural, “they’ve gone through so much, and there’s a lot of trauma. It’s amazing to see them move from that place to getting into housing and saying, ‘I did it, I CAN do it!’. It’s a blast of hope for the other families working towards that goal.”  

Through his work, Natural not only hopes to help families currently experiencing homelessness to find housing but strives to raise awareness among his friends, family, and broader networks about our crisis of homelessness and how we can end it. “Homelessness is our ‘new’ pandemic,” says Natural, “it can reach anyone. When people think of homelessness, they don’t often think of families, but families with children make up 30% of the unhoused population nationally. These are children and parents who are trying their hardest to get back to some semblance of normality and safety. 

If we want to solve our crisis of family homelessness, we all must get involved at the federal, state, and local level to advocate for legislation and funding that makes housing accessible to all families.”