When People Serving People accepted Haven Housing’s gift of St. Anne’s Place in 2024, we became stewards of a mission that started nearly 50 years ago. The history of St. Anne’s Place is connected to a larger story—one that is rooted in a community’s mission to care for and uplift women.
The story of St. Anne’s Place begins with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (“the Sisters”) and their convent. In 1981, the Sisters moved out of their convent to live independently. They saw this as the perfect opportunity to turn their former residence into a shelter called Ascension Place. It would be a “transitional home for women to rise, recover, and reclaim their lives.”
The shelter opened that same year and was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1983. Ascension Place, Inc. would later be rebranded as Haven Housing in 2016.
In the years that followed, family homelessness rose sharply in Hennepin County. With Ascension Place continuously full, the Sisters and fellow community members looked to add another location: an empty 16-room convent that was once part of St. Anne’s Parish in North Minneapolis. In 1990, they refurbished the convent and reopened it as St. Anne’s Place. It would serve as Minneapolis’s only short-term emergency shelter for women and children.
Over the next 36 years, St. Anne’s Place supported approximately 5,400 woman-led families. The shelter’s intimate setting and transformative programs served as a shining example for other emergency shelter providers.
This North Minneapolis shelter, with its community-centric values and trauma-informed approach to care, shared many similarities with People Serving People. Leaders at Haven Housing took this into account when they gathered in 2023 to discuss sunsetting their organization due to funding challenges. They knew that closing St. Anne’s Place was not an option. It just needed a new values-aligned organization to operate it.
Later that year, Haven Housing approached leaders at People Serving People, Minnesota’s largest provider of shelter and services to families experiencing homelessness, to discuss a groundbreaking idea: gifting St. Anne’s Place to People Serving People. People Serving People’s Board of Directors voted to accept the gift of St. Anne’s Place as its second shelter site in December 2023. The gifting process was finalized with a signing ceremony on May 2, 2024.
Since then, our Downtown Shelter and St. Anne’s Place have learned a lot from each other. In his speech at our fall gala that same year, People Serving People CEO, Hoang Murphy, shared, “We have brought the efficiencies of a larger enterprise to a smaller shelter, but the true value is that St. Anne’s has shown us there are better ways of helping families heal.”
Thanks to our community of supporters, St. Anne’s Place continues to grow under the People Serving People umbrella. Services at St. Anne’s Place have now expanded to include our Families for Finance program and a new women’s group that started in late 2025.
