HOME ABOUT SERVICES ART PROGRAM DONATE CONTACT Our History Shalom House began in 1972 with one man’s belief that there had to be a safe, caring place where people with mental illness could live in our community. Having watched his brother Torsten’s painful journey through various family member homes to mental hospitals and shelters, Birger Johnson, one of Shalom House’s founders, dreamed of creating “a place halfway between.” And so, with the help of Thor and Connie Korda, friends, churches and Governor Curtis, Shalom House was opened on High Street in Portland in 1972. Although Torsten had never seen Shalom House (he lived in Los Angeles), his experience with mental illness helped create a safe place for others to live. Change and choice have always driven Shalom House. In the late 1960’s thousands of patients with mental illness were released from hospitals during the deinstitutionalization movement and forced to fend for themselves in unprepared and often unwelcoming communities. With the creation of Shalom House, people with mental illness were offered a halfway house to ease the transition from hospital to independent living. We’ve grown from one house with 15 beds to an organization that offers comprehensive services and a range of affordable housing options. And as we’ve grown, we’ve changed to meet the changing needs of our clients. We learned that stable, long-term housing with flexible support is the key to recovery. We no longer just operate halfway houses, but offer a wide range of affordable, decent housing choices – independent apartments, group homes, rooming houses – with varying levels of assistance depending upon the needs of each client. The original Shalom House was renamed to Brannigan House in 2002 in honor then Executive Director Joseph Brannigan, who has since passed. Shalom House, Inc. Tom Gorman Center and Residential Campus 106 Gilman Street, Portland, Maine 04102 Tel: (207) 874-1080 Fax: (207) 874-1077 Mon-Fri: 9am to 4pm Email: generalmail@shalomhouseinc.org Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Cebuano Chichewa Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Kurdish (Kurmanji) Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mongolian Myanmar (Burmese) Nepali Norwegian Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Scottish Gaelic Serbian Sesotho Shona Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sudanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu