Emma Norton Services

Registration for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala is now open! Early bird registration is available today through March 31, with prices going up on April 1. Register using the link below, or the registration hyperlink on the homepage of our website! https://lnkd.in/gE3X6URt

It's Women's History Month! To celebrate, we're sharing pieces from our historical archive. Today we’re covering 2007 to 2017. In this period of time Emma Norton Services grew significantly, adding more clients and staff every year. This was in part due to the recession causing a new wave of homelessness, but it was also due to the incredible success of our programs. In 2015 the decision was made to shift services to a housing first and harm reduction model for our supportive housing programs. This decision wasn’t made lightly, but was done in response to overwhelming evidence that these practices have the statistically best long-term outcomes. This meant that clients entering our programs were no longer required to be sober, as evidence shows long-term sobriety is more likely to be achieved in a safe environment than in response to duress. It also signified a major shift in our thinking about this work. Rather than telling our clients what they needed to heal and when it should happen, we began prioritizing the goals they had as an individual. The more work we did from this perspective, the more we saw the importance of autonomy in healing from homelessness, and how the spaces we’re in can influence that. At Emma’s Place every family has their own home; in Scattered-Site they have even more autonomy in a private apartment of their own choosing. At Emma Norton Residence, we were serving 40-50 people at a time, almost all of them sharing a room with another resident, and now all of them had significant traumas in their past. We knew our people deserved better… Come back on Monday to read about the latest chapter of our history, 2018 to now! Want to be a part of this amazing legacy of service in the Twin Cities? Make sure you're registered for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! Register here: https://lnkd.in/guKpBsny

Almost everyone experiences trauma at some point in their life, but in childhood it can have significant impacts on lifelong health outcomes. A landmark study in the 1990s, called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, defined the kinds of childhood trauma that are associated with negative outcomes, and studied how these patterns are stronger the more ACEs a person experienced. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are things like neglect, abuse, financial hardship, discrimination, witnessing violence, or having a caregiver who is struggling with substance abuse or severe mental health symptoms. The impact these events have are borne out by the numbers. In the general American population, about 60% of people have experienced at least one ACE—for people who have experienced homelessness it’s 99%. In the general American population, 17.1% of people experienced four or more ACEs. Among people who have experienced chronic homelessness, that number is 89.3% This is why trauma-informed care is a vital aspect of the services we provide. We know nearly everyone we serve experienced significant traumas in their developmental years, and we have evidence-backed practices to work with the challenges those traumas bring. Support this vital work by registering for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala here: https://lnkd.in/guKpBsny You can also give online here: www.emmanorton.org/donate/

It's Women's History Month! To celebrate, we're sharing pieces from our historical archive. Today we’re covering the establishment of Emma’s Place in the early 2000s. As we wrote about last week, Emma Norton began serving people in recovery from homelessness in the 1990s. From there we began the Scattered-Site Program in 1994 so that we could transition clients out of Emma Norton Residence and into privately owned apartments, where they were often reuniting with children they had lost custody of in the past. But as we did this work, we kept coming across the same obstacles to serving larger families. They simply could not afford housing the size they needed, and even if they could afford it, rentals of an appropriate size were few and far between. In response to this, Emma Norton began planning a site-based program specifically for large families in the late 1990s. By 2000 the project had a name- Emma’s Place. It would be 13 townhomes, each with at least four bedrooms, surrounding a playground and community building. Just like Emma Norton Residence, there would be a focus on supportive services like recovery programs, counseling, social enrichment activities, and job training. In late 2001 construction on Emma’s Place began, and at the same time our organization took on the name it wears today- Emma Norton Services- to reflect the multiple programs in the organization. In June of 2002 the grand opening of Emma’s Place was held, and that same week the first 13 families moved in. Emma’s Place quickly became a vibrant program with special services specifically for parents and for children. Working with these families taught our organization so much about the obstacles commonly faced by families trying to stabilize their housing. This understanding led to another transformation of our organization- implementing housing first policies. Stay tuned- later this week we’ll be covering the 2007-2017! Want to be a part of this amazing legacy of service in the Twin Cities? Make sure you're registered for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! Register here: https://lnkd.in/guKpBsny

Thank you to the companies and organizations who have already signed on to sponsor the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! We have The Game Show Studio and Regions Hospital as Opening Doors Supporters, and Mighty Consulting, Old National Bank, and Ryan Companies US, Inc. as Opening Advocates so far! ?Would you like to have your company recognized as a sponsor of the Opening Doors Gala? Please contact Shawna Nelsen-Wills, Advancement Director, at?[email protected] for more information.

There's just one week left to take advantage of the early bird discount on individual tickets to the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! Register today: https://lnkd.in/gE3X6URt Here are just a few of the highlights planned for this year’s Gala:? – Celebrate the work of Emma Norton with award-winning & talented host Shá Cage.? – Hear moving testimonials from Emma Norton residents and staff.? – Rejoice with us in the opening of our new building, Restoring Waters.? – Experience interactive entertainment provided by event sponsor Game Show Studio.? – Enjoy great food with friends, while bidding on silent and live auction items.? – Contribute to the “Fund-A-Need” to help our residents heal and thrive!??

It's Women's History Month! To celebrate, we're sharing pieces from our historical archive. Today we’re covering the 1990s! As noted yesterday, we had begun serving women transitioning out of recovery programs in 1987. While many of these women were coming from substance abuse recovery, we heard from our residents increasingly often that their life had been effected by not just their own, but others substance abuse as well. In response to this growing crisis we hired a Chemical Dependency Counselor in the early 1990s. In 1992 Ramsey County faced a crisis in rapidly rising homelessness, especially for women. Emma Norton responded by making the residence a shelter space for three months, but quickly realized much more needed to be done. Out of this moment, the Scattered-Site Program was born, beginning in 1994. In the beginning most of the clients in this program were transitioning out of Emma Norton Residence, helping keep beds open for people in need of emergency shelter. The Scattered-Site Program had our organization working with many more families, and we found consistent obstacles to helping larger families. It pained us to see parents unable to reunite with their kids only because they couldn’t afford a living space large enough. From this, the idea for Emma’s Place was born—a place specifically created to house, support, and celebrate families with three or more children. Stay tuned—next week we’ll be covering the planning and opening of Emma’s Place in Maplewood! Want to be a part of this amazing legacy of service in the Twin Cities? Make sure you're registered for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gE3X6URt

It's Women's History Month! To celebrate, we're sharing pieces from our historical archive. Today we’re sharing pieces from the 1980s, including scans of flyers, newsletters, board reports, and articles published about Emma Norton. Throughout the 1980s Emma Norton continued to expand the populations we served as community needs presented themselves. More hearing-impaired students lived at the residence, and medical students and students training to be ASL interpreters also joined the residence. In 1980, Emma Norton began housing high school girls working as pages during the legislative session. Over 100 pages representing districts from every corner of Minnesota lived at Emma Norton Residence over the years this partnership. In 1981, Emma Norton also began a partnership with two nearby hospitals, Gilette Children’s Hospital and Regions Hospital (then called Ramsey Hospital), to house family members of patients in long-term critical care. It started with the three wives of workers who were injured in a grain elevator explosion in South Dakota— they were able to pay for housing at ENR by the week, for less than a single night stay at a motel in St. Paul. This event revealed that affordable housing for these families was a hugely unmet need. The way the dorms were built with shared bathrooms had been an obstacle to housing boys and men in the past, but they also needed this housing. To facilitate this, the program director stopped living on-site for the first time since 1917. Their living quarters were converted into two private rooms with a shared private bath, so couples, families with sons, and single fathers could also have access to Emma Norton Residence. The shift into what Emma Norton Services is today began in 1987, when we started housing women transitioning out of substance abuse recovery programs. The Board of Directors saw supportive housing for women in recovery as a growing need, and hired an additional program director specifically for this new population the organization would be serving. Evidencing how great the need was, within just a few months of this program starting, women transitioning from recovery programs were over a quarter of the people living at Emma Norton Residence. Stay tuned—tomorrow we’ll be covering the 1990s! Want to be a part of this amazing legacy of service in the Twin Cities? Make sure you're registered for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gE3X6URt Bonus: Also included in this photo drop is a scan of the Spring 1980 issue of the Residence Newsletter, which includes a blurb about then-Executive Director Casey Johnson speaking with President Jimmy Carter on NPR!

It's Women's History Month! To celebrate, we're sharing pieces from our historical archive. This week we're sharing documents from the 1970s, including the first issue of the Residence Newsletter, and articles and pictures documenting our partnership with St. Paul College’s Program for Deaf Students. Emma Norton Services has been able to be of service in the Twin Cities for over a century in part due to a willingness to change to meet community needs. An incredible opportunity for this kind of change appeared just 4 years after the Emma Norton Residence opened—a partnership with what was then called the St. Paul Technical & Vocational Institute. With a growing program for deaf students, the college needed special housing for those students, and Emma Norton Residence stepped up to provide that housing for the young hearing-impaired women in the program. It started with six students in 1971—by 1981, hearing impaired students comprised one third of the people living at Emma Norton! Stay tuned, tomorrow we’ll be covering the 1980s! Want to be a part of this amazing legacy of service in the Twin Cities? Make sure you're registered for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gE3X6URt

There's only 13 days left to take advantage of the early bird discount for the 2025 Opening Doors Gala! Have you registered yet? Get your ticket today: https://lnkd.in/gE3X6URt