For Cecilia Schonian, one of the hardest parts of living in her car was simply finding a place to park.

She learned to avoid malls and shopping centers, where security guards quickly rousted alleged loiterers. Instead, she sought out the well-lit parking lots of hotels and motels across the East Bay. Once there, she’d peer out of her windows with a dash of envy at people sleeping indoors just feet away.

“It’s depressing — you know that whoever is sleeping in those rooms are comfy, they’re showered and they’re clean,” Schonian said. “But it was just what I needed to do at the time. And I got through it.”

The turning point came when Schonian, 37, walked through the front doors of Swords to Plowshares, an organization with 50 years of experience helping homeless and impoverished military veterans such as herself. Nearly a year after first visiting the nonprofit, she now lives in her own apartment and works at the front desk of the organization’s Oakland Service Center.

Through the East Bay Times’ Share the Spirit campaign, which helps the neediest in our communities, Swords to Plowshares is hoping to raise $35,000 to help boost that center, which provides a wealth of services for military veterans.

It’s the same place that Schonian visited in October 2023, after finding the nonprofit through a simple Google search. After tapping out the words “rental assistance for veterans around me,” she followed one of the first links to appear on her phone to discover the organization’s drop-in center located in Oakland’s Jack London Square.

Upon her arrival, Schonian felt near-immediate relief. She could tell that the years of turmoil that plagued the past decade of her life — her struggles with homelessness, unemployment and alcoholism — were nearing an end.

“It just felt like I was at home,” said Schonian, who served for five years in the Air Force as an active-duty airman, as well as another two years in the Air Force Reserves, before leaving the service with untreated post-traumatic stress. “I had people that understood me and cared about me, that weren’t going to judge me off of whatever was happening in my life at that time.”

Swords to Plowshares traces its roots back to 1974, when Vietnam War veterans in San Francisco began searching for a way to help their fellow soldiers struggling with high rates of unemployment, homelessness and substance abuse. Their initial answer came in the form of a drop-in center, one specializing in providing legal support to people filing medical claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Over the next 50 years, the nonprofit expanded its services exponentially.

Just last year, the nonprofit helped more than 3,100 military veterans, more than a third of whom were new to the organization, according to its 2023 annual report. Nearly 45% of those people had been homeless when they sought help, having spent an average of more than three years without a permanent indoor place to live.

Many of those people were placed into one of the nonprofit’s 500 housing units that it operates across the Bay Area, while others were offered rental assistance. The nonprofit also helped connect veterans to mental health care, doled out more than 100,000 meals and distributed nearly 1,000 gun locks to help stem the tide of suicides among former military service members.

“A lot of this growth is based on the needs of veterans and seeing what the gaps in care and services are, and making sure that there was the entity that was culturally able to provide the care and services that veterans needed and to advocate on their behalf,” Tramecia Garner, the nonprofit’s executive director, said.

About 20 years ago, the nonprofit expanded its work across the Bay Bridge into the East Bay, where it opened a center at 330 Franklin St. in downtown Oakland. It’s an outlet that helps about 500 East Bay veterans every year with housing vouchers, food handouts, gas vouchers, hygiene kits and holiday backpacks.

These days, Schonian is tasked with greeting most every person to walk through the center’s front doors.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Schonian handed out gourmet turkey breast sandwiches from from Salt & Honey to a handful of visitors, then she sat down to enroll a man in a popular supportive housing program. She didn’t even try to convince the man to go to a crowded shelter — a place that he flat-out refused to visit. Rather, Schonian convinced him to apply for an apartment of his own.

All the while, Schonian spoke with an air of credibility that newcomers to the nonprofit respond to, said James Thomas, 80. He described routinely visiting the nonprofit over the past decade for help with paying rent, keeping his wardrobe stocked or meeting the month’s bills.

“You can feel that she’s caring about the individuals she’s talking to,” said Thomas, who stopped by this time for help with his water bill. “Her emotions come from the heart.”

For Schonian, the goal is to help other military veterans escape that same cycle of homelessness that led her to the nonprofit’s front doors last year.

“I was meant to go through everything that I went through for a reason,” Schonian said. “Now I get to celebrate those victories with them.”