A FAMILY SAFETY NET
When Belkin Yojana Vasquez lost her Sunnyvale apartment in a November 2019 fire, the pregnant mother of four had no idea what the family was going to do, or even where they would sleep that first night.
Then a police officer connected her with Sunnyvale Community Services — a nonprofit that helped pay for a hotel room for her and her children. Vasquez and her kids stayed at the hotel for a few weeks until SCS helped her move into a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Clara.
“They helped a lot with my kids, with the rent, with getting an apartment,” Vasquez, a Honduran immigrant and single mother, said in Spanish. “They helped me giving me the beds, blankets. They gave me a lot of things to get ahead with my kids.”
When the COVID-19 crisis hit, Vasquez lost her job as an office custodian. And, it couldn’t have come at a worst time as she had just given birth to her youngest daughter.
But SCS stepped in again to help the family of five. They offered holistic support geared toward helping clients deal with an immediate crisis and “not just survive, begin to thrive,” said Maria Buenrostro, a financial literacy coach for the agency.
For Vasquez, Buenrostro became a key source of emotional support, beyond the financial and material aid the nonprofit provided the family, which included furniture, kitchen supplies, food and rental assistance after the fire and later, help filing for unemployment benefits.
“For me, she is like a mother, she is like my sister, my friend and more than anything, a therapist because when I lost my job I became depressed,” Vasquez said. “She helped me a lot.”