b'At Everett Gospel Mission, our goal was to improve our guests abilities to rest and recharge while showing Gods love, and we accomplished that goal even better than Id dreamed. Several catalysts pushed us to start rethinking our sleeping accommoda-tions. I was in my last few weeks of being the director of the mens shelter. A man in one of our beds had a job; his bunkmate didnt work, but he did have Restless Leg Syndrome. Bunk beds are notorious for not stifling movement, and the working man got upset. They ended up getting into a physical altercation over it. We also had too many people who simply couldnt get into an upper bunk, so we had empty beds. We had 66 beds, but we would average only having 40 to 45 of them full because not enough people could get up and down on a top bunk, so we didnt have good full occupancy. The other factor at play was that our mayor created a task force in 2015 to study crime and other issues on the citys streetsbut nobody talked to the people who lived on the streets. So we created a focus group and invited peo-ple to our shelter for a meal. We talked for several hours about what keeps them from coming to our shelter. We heard things like, I dont feel like my stuff is secureI need a place to charge my phoneI dont have any pri-vacyI need room to breathe. At the time, we used an emergency-shelter formatmats on the floor that were 20 inches apartto house as many 36 WWW.CITYGATENETWORK.ORG JULY/AUGUST 2021'