About COTS

COTS is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization located in Petaluma, California, about 40 miles north of San Francisco. COTS offers help and hope to homeless persons in Sonoma County by providing safe shelter and housing, helping people develop steady incomes and helping them get back under a roof of their own. COTS also helps homeless families become stable and break the cycle of homelessness by teaching homeless parents to make their children's needs a high priority and to provide a safe, loving and secure home for their children. COTS' main website provides comprehensive information about the agency and programs.

Invitation to Somatic Experiencing Practitioners

Volunteer at COTS SE Clinic
Contact us to find out about our next orientation

Explore offering SE to people who are homeless in your own community



Dear Bay Area SE Community,

Deborah Boyar, Patricia Meadows and Lee Wylie invite you to join us in a deeply rewarding and worthwhile project, as we implement an SE Clinic at the COTS Center for Homeless Children and Their Families in Petaluma. We’ve been consulting, educating, and working with the staff of COTS (Committee on the Shelterless) since April 2006, exploring how they can integrate basic SE principles and skills into their programming and into the lives of their participants—parents and children who live at the Center for a few months as they rebuild their lives on many fronts.

The COTS staff and Executive Director have welcomed us most fully, and made an ongoing commitment to integrate SE into more and more of their offerings. COTS is an incredibly progressive place that must be seen and experienced to be believed. We hope you'll get a feel for it by reading some of the material on this site (there are also some short videos).

Our SE work has been so warmly and gratefully received at COTS that we have continued to broaden our offerings. The newest outcome of our collaboration is an SE Clinic, which we launched in October 2007! We’ve seen the possibility of shifting symptoms in as few as one to three sessions, using an approach to SE informed by both the Trauma First Aide model and the Trauma Vidya protocol used in India.

Now that we’ve begun to see the possibilities of a very focused, short-term SE approach with this population, we’d like to involve others from our Bay Area SE community, so that many more homeless people can benefit from receiving SE sessions and learning basic SE practices to add to their expanding life skills.

We invite all SEPs, as well as SE students who have completed at least the Intermediate Level of training, to attend our next orientation for potential volunteers to the SE Clinic at COTS; please email for information about the day and date of the next orientation. If you decide to join our clinic and volunteer your skills, we ask that you be willing to make a 2-hour per month commitment (two SE sessions per month). We’d like you to consider at least a 3-6 month commitment. If our own experience is any indication, we trust that the phenomenal inspiration and personal rewards you’ll receive from your participation will keep you coming back! We envision our SE clinic expanding and continuing to grow over time.

SE Clinics are held at COTS every Wednesday from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, with Mondays from 4:00 to 6:00 pm as an alternative. If you are not available at those times, other opportunities can be arranged to offer SE sessions to COTS staff members (in person and/or by telephone) at times that fit your mutual availability. If you’d like to join our project, please attend our orientation, even if the official clinic times are not compatible with your present schedule.

If you’d like to help serve a highly motivated population who are very eager to heal and restore balance to their lives, we encourage you to investigate this wonderful opportunity. It’s a great way to deepen your SE skills in an enormously gratifying setting, and also provide meaningful service to local homeless families. We welcome all who feel called to participate in this project with us!

And, if you'd like to explore offering SE in support of homeless people in your own community, please see our 'How to' page.

Please email Patricia Meadows or call her at 415.883.8321 to indicate your interest in volunteering, as well as to register for the upcoming orientation. In the meantime, for further information about our project, please see this article in the Spring 2007 FHE newsletter.

Warmly,

Deborah Boyar, Patricia Meadows and Lee Wylie

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