Around 5:30 p.m., Mary Vega, 26, and her two children arrive at Cross of Peace Lutheran Church in Shakopee for the night. By 10 p.m. they had dinner prepared by volunteers and are settled on air beds in a church classroom.
Around 7 a.m. the next day they're shuttled to the Families Moving Forward-Southwest Program Center, at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, where Vega spends the day looking for jobs and caring for her 2-year-old.
Vega, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, and three other families in the Families Moving Forward program repeat this back-and-forth routine every day. After 10 days in Shakopee, they'll move to the next makeshift shelter, in Prior Lake, Belle Plaine or somewhere else.
But the shuffling is worth it for Vega because it means not uprooting her family from the southwest metropolitan area.
Families Moving Forward is a Minneapolis-based program that expanded to Scott and Carver counties in 2014. Program volunteers create shelters within congregation spaces, mostly churches, and house homeless families for one to eight weeks at a time. They provide dinner and activities each night and give families have a chance to save money, look for work and find a new home with the help of case workers during the day.
For the first time, a Shakopee church has come on board to provide shelter space. From Dec. 4 to 14, Cross of Peace was home to the four families.
Vega, who started the program with her two children in mid-November, said it's been a hard, but necessary, transition.
"It is new people all the time. It is different rules. It's different settings for your kids," Vega said. "But for the most part, the program really focuses on making them feel welcome ... there's an activity every single night."
"It's grown to the needs that are down [in the southwest metro area]," said Sakinah Mujahid, program manager for Families Moving Forward. "Before they were just sleeping underneath the radar."
WHAT 'HOMELESS' MEANS
As defined by the federal government, the category of "homeless" is a lot broader than someone panhandling on the street corner or sleeping under a bridge.
A person or family who does not have "regular and adequate" nighttime residence is considered homeless. This includes people sleeping in cars, parks, abandoned buildings, motels/hotels, nonprofit shelters and even people who are couch surfing with friends or family.
According to a 2014 survey by Families Moving Forward, about 50 families in Scott and Carver County are homeless on any given night. That's about 116 children. At Cross of Peace alone there were 10 children between the ages of 2 and 16.
The legal definition also includes those at risk for losing their home like Vega, who started looking for a new home earlier in 2016.
"I was looking for anywhere to get into but you don't really find cheaper housing in the suburbs," she said. "Every place I found was in bad neighborhoods or crappy apartments because they were the only ones that would let me move in right away and that was affordable."
According to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development's cost-of-living calculator tool, a single parent with two children would need $79,714 annually to live in Scott County and $83,009 to live in Carver County. That would require someone to make about $38 an hour to keep up with the cost of living in Scott County. At her best position, Vega made $17 an hour.
When her housing search came up short and her money was running out, she decided to start calling crisis agencies.
Most shelters in Minneapolis were packed. Some local programs were full. But mostly, Vega couldn't find the resources she needed to help her stay in the southwest suburbs.
And the longer it took, the more her savings dried up.
By chance Vega called Families Moving Forward after being turned away a few months earlier. It had a one spot open and the family transitioned just in time for the house they rented in Savage to sell a few weeks later.
Vega said she's used to being independent and has been working since she was 15 years old.
After becoming pregnant with her first child, Vega moved out of south Minneapolis where she grew up.
She didn't want her child influenced by the drug and gang activity she saw around her, so she left to give her growing family a more stable life in the southwest suburbs. But Vega experienced what Mujahid described as a common "ripple effect."
"One of the stereotypes is that they just made wrong choices or they should do better ... no one chooses to be homeless, things just happen," Mujahid said. "Life happens."
In the past eight years, Vega lost her first child and then had two more. She slowly worked toward an associate's degree in education, but had to leave the program six credits shy of finishing. Instead of studying, she became a full-time caretaker for a family member who later died of cancer. Health care costs ate up her money before she found her way to Families Moving Forward.
Before her "ripple effect" started, Vega remembers volunteering at shelters and events that assist homeless people. She said the volunteer experience was good for resume building and she never imagined she'd be on the receiving end.
"I was always pretty dedicated to working and making sure that I wasn't in this position," Vega said. "It humbles you in a way that life reminds you that everybody can fall."
'GET A JOB'
Before getting involved as a Families Moving Forward co-coordinator at Cross of Peace, Jodie McKie remembers hearing disparaging comments about panhandlers.
"I wanted to know what this community was doing about it," McKie said. "So many people talk about it in a negative way: 'Why don't they just get a job?' 'Oh they just want money.'
"There's more to it than that. There's a deeper story."
Even with rushing through training, learning a new scheduling system and having numerous conversations with other congregation members, McKie and Dianne Schanhaar hosted the church's 10 days successfully.
About 60 people from the church, which usually serves about 150 people at Sunday services, helped in setting up, cooking, driving, tutoring and organizing activities.
"It talks really about more than just one individual or one group trying to help homelessness," Mujahid said. "It's a whole community effort to end homelessness one at a time.
For Vega, her priority is to find a stable job and then a home. Eventually, she wants to finish her degree to set an example for her children. But she's also ready to give back to the program that's helped her.
"It's no longer an extracurricular kind of thing or something to look good on a resume," Vega said. "It's something that each and every one of these people did something for me and my family at a time that I had nobody else."