- “Families are having to make really hard decisions, figuring out where can they go tonight, where is somewhere safe that they can sleep tonight, whether that’s sleeping in their car or staying with a friend for a couple of nights.” – Paige Allmendinger, Chief Product Officer at ReloShare
In California, one in 25 children has no home to call their own. For tens of thousands of families, “bedtime” means the backseat of a car, a borrowed mattress, or a friend’s couch. What often remains invisible is that most of these children are not on the streets—they are hidden in cars, shelters, or temporary spaces, cycling between instability and exhaustion.
Paige Allmendinger, Chief Product Officer at ReloShare and a social worker who has spent her career helping families in crisis, said that the system meant to catch people when they fall is broken.
“What I see as the current state of homelessness is how easy is it for families to find emergency shelter space when they’re in crisis? How simple can it be to report that you need help and be able to find somewhere safe that you and your family can stay tonight?” she said in an interview with the Vanguard. “What I know from my experience is that that is a really complicated process and it’s not as easy as reaching out for help and being able to find a shelter bed.”
ReloShare, a Chicago-based technology company that describes itself as the world’s first marketplace for social services, is working to change that. The organization partners with shelters, nonprofits, and government agencies to help families in crisis quickly locate available beds or, when necessary, book short-term hotel stays for safety and stability.
Through its new California expansion, ReloShare aims to simplify the process of finding emergency housing and give families in danger a place to sleep tonight—not months or years from now.
Allmendinger said families across California are routinely forced to make impossible choices when there is no space available.
“Families are having to make really hard decisions, figuring out where can they go tonight, where is somewhere safe that they can sleep tonight, whether that’s sleeping in their car or staying with a friend for a couple of nights,” she said. “One in 25 Californian children, which is one in every classroom across the state, is experiencing homelessness right now.”
While advocates and lawmakers continue to push for more long-term affordable housing, Allmendinger said the immediate need—somewhere safe to sleep tonight—often goes unaddressed.
“Building housing is really a long process,” she said. “We love that that work is happening, but we know that people need help tonight and they need somewhere safe to go tonight.”
To close that gap, her team is working to build a coordinated statewide system that allows shelters, service providers, and emergency responders to quickly find available beds and connect families to safe spaces. The goal, she said, is to make emergency housing “as simple as booking a hotel room.”
“There’s not a great amount of transparency between organizations around what shelter spaces are available,” Allmendinger said. “There’s no central repository to say, ‘We don’t have a bed, but we can easily find you a bed at another one of our partner agencies.’”
Her organization has built a statewide digital network where shelters can log in and instantly share bed availability across cities and counties. The system eliminates the frantic phone calls and uncertainty that often leave families waiting overnight for a place to go.
“This has to be a statewide initiative to make sure that all shelter availability is being tracked,” Allmendinger said. “We can really centralize our resources and focus on where do we need to build more housing? Where do we need to build more emergency housing?”
Another part of the initiative connects service agencies with hotel partners to provide confidential short-term stays for families or survivors of violence who have nowhere else to go. “Many families experiencing homelessness might be fleeing violence,” Allmendinger said. “We’ve partnered with hotels across the country that allow vetted nonprofit and governmental organizations to book hotel rooms under false names so that that person can find safe emergency housing without risking their confidentiality.”
The system was first piloted in Illinois through a partnership with the state’s domestic violence hotline and has since expanded nationwide.
“Earlier this year we decided to open up and expand to other communities across the country,” Allmendinger said. “Right now we have 20 different states that have expressed interest.”
California, she added, has already shown strong engagement.
“We’re actively partnering with folks across the Bay Area and the LA area that are interested in building the networks so that we can make it a useful tool for them to coordinate shelter effectively.”
But Allmendinger said that, for real impact, state and local officials need to lead.
“This is something that state and local leaders should also be invested in because the coordination for their communities and across the state is essential,” she said. “We need leadership. We’re really hoping that this campaign drives home just the need that Californians and families have so that leaders can step up and really say that they want to find a solution to make this an easier system.”
To draw attention to the issue, the team launched No Room to Dream, a public installation and storytelling campaign that debuted Thursday at Oakland City Hall.
The exhibit features reimagined “bedrooms” that confront visitors with the everyday realities of childhood homelessness and highlight the voices of people who lived through it.
“The campaign is really looking at centering the experiences of real people who experienced homelessness as children and what it meant to not have a safe space to call their own,” Allmendinger said. “We want to humanize it. We want to put people’s faces to these stories. Especially for children experiencing homelessness, we want folks to realize that in some ways it’s a hidden epidemic in California and across the country.”
One of those stories is Jillian’s, who grew up in a newly-arrived immigrant family that struggled to make ends meet.
“She loved school, she loved reading, and she talks a lot about how she didn’t have a space to go to have quiet time to focus on her schoolwork and how it was really unsettling to not know where she was going to sleep in any given night,” Allmendinger said.
Through both technology and storytelling, Allmendinger and her team hope to reshape how Californians think about homelessness—not as a distant social problem, but as a system that can be fixed.
“We want to make sure that we’re creating systems and opportunities for families to have the safe housing that they deserve,” she said.
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