Rikki Thomas sat on the corner of her double bed and gestured to the room around her.

"I feel safe here. It's a sanctuary. I can wake up and leave my door open when I go out. I have never had that before," the 28-year-old said of her new home at Crossroads Downtown.

Before finding her sanctuary, Thomas had lived on the street for close to 15 years, resorting to prostitution to survive and drugs and alcohol to dull the pain and trauma of street life.

Three months ago, while staying at the Women's Emergency Accommodation Centre for homeless women, Thomas heard of Crossroads Downtown, an E4C housing organization project designed to help women and transgendered individuals who want to leave prostitution and the street behind by giving them a roof over their heads. It also helps them become self-reliant and secure permanent housing on their own.

Women involved in prostitution struggle with physical and mental illnesses, and drug and alcohol addictions while facing violence, abuse, criminal persecution, poverty and homelessness.

Crossroads Downtown, which consists of two homes with room for eight women, follows the housing first model which has been found to be more economically responsible than leaving the chronically homeless on the street.

It has proven successful across North America.

Both Homeward Trust Edmonton and the Alberta government, with its 10-year-old plan to end homelessness, have adopted the model.

Until she found Crossroads, Thomas's life was bleak. While she is at times a little overwhelmed by her new environment, for the first time in her life she is starting to think about a future that will include a job, returning to school and having a place of her own. "I'm taking it slow right now because it really is overwhelming. But it is incredible and I am so grateful."

The typical person wouldn't understand how important a place like Crossroads is unless they also have struggled on the street she said.

Crossroads Downtown program manager Crystal Finch said when the housing project opened last December, six women moved in. After they were settled in, support staff arranged for them to see doctors, dentists and counsellors, and began working with them to overcome the issues which led them to prostitution and were keeping them homeless.

"A few of them really opened up to us immediately. The hurt and trauma they have been through was really painful to hear and I went home and cried a lot that first week. But now I get emotional for different reasons--now it's for that pivotal moment in a woman's life when she enters treatment for her addictions, when she moves into her own home, when she gets her daughter back. Their resiliency is powerful," Finch said.

When the women move out after a year, Crossroads staff continue to visit and offer ongoing support. "We really get to witness the changes they make and I am very proud to be part of that," Finch said.

Mayor Stephen Mandel called the housing first model fundamental to solving the issue of homelessness.

"If you can't get a roof over someone's head, you can't get them an opportunity to make the changes they must make to face the challenges ahead, whatever they may be.

"I think this type of model, this approach is a solution that allows them to have the people and services they need to begin to change their lives and become full participants and contributors to this city."

The major funding for Crossroads Downtown came from Homeward Trust Edmonton, with an additional $50,000 contribution from No Room in the Inn, an annual appeal to Edmonton-area churchs and parishes which is used to help the city's homeless.