Mary’s Place has announced that Amazon will add a new temporary building for homeless people within its new Seattle Headquarters - a six-story building adjacent to Amazon's new office building. 

Amazon will devote its more than 47,000 square-foot (4,367 square-metre) office space within Amazon’s newest headquarters building as a permanent home for a Mary’s Place Family Shelter. This first-of-its-kind partnership will include 65 rooms, which will shelter more than 200 homeless women, children, and families each night.

In April 2016, Amazon provided Mary’s Place with temporary use of a vacant building on its growing urban campus – a former Travelodge hotel. Amazon upgraded and decorated the building and included utilities for more than 200 family members while awaiting construction of a new building. Construction at 2213 8th Ave is scheduled to begin in the fall, and Amazon will work with Mary’s Place to temporarily move the families to another former hotel across the street as it builds this new, permanent home.

"The new Mary’s Place shelter will include a family resource center similar to those at Mary’s Place Family Centers in North Seattle and White Center where more than 40 local nonprofits and teams of community and corporate volunteers join Mary’s Place staff onsite to provide services and work with families to help them secure permanent housing and employment," stated in a press release sent by Mary’s Place.

Amazon employees are frequent visitors and volunteers at the existing shelter – bringing meals, organizing arts and crafts projects, throwing parties for the families, and more. By sharing permanent space with Mary’s Place, Amazon employees will now have even more opportunities to volunteer and support the organization and the families they serve.

"Mary’s Place does incredible, life-saving work every day for women, children, and families experiencing homelessness in the Seattle community,"said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. 

"We are lucky to count them as neighbors and thrilled to offer them a permanent home within our downtown Seattle headquarters – Amazon employees and Mary’s Place residents will move in together in early 2020."

Amazon building boom continues in downtown Seattle and the company builds three additional buildings in the north of downtown Seattle, just adjacent to the three-block Amazon development project already in the works. In addition, Amazon develops new crystallised bio-domes designed by NBBJ, to facilitate the  city with retail and new office functions within a giant domed-structures.

Amazon's bio-domes are currently under construction. The structures will include approx. 40,000 plants placed within the domes, which are slated to open next year.

All images courtesy of Amazon

> via Mary’s Place