She started tearing up after getting off the phone with a representative from the state Department of Social and Health Services Tuesday morning.

They were tears of relief.

“I’ve been at the shelter for two weeks and I may have found my son and I a place,” said Sara Gregoire, who has been at St. Vincent de Paul, an emergency shelter for single women and their children in Bremerton.

Gregoire, 30 — no relation to the governor — was kicked out of her home a month ago by her husband and floated from hotel to a friend’s house to her parents’ before arriving at the shelter with her 3-year-old son, Paul.

Often invisible, the homeless of Kitsap County have goals to improve their situations, they say, and also credit the help provided by homeless shelters for guiding them.

Part of the help is the rules and restrictions, such as forcing residents to continue searching for jobs and permanent housing.

But despite the help offered, bed space and resources are limited.

“There’s just too many people and not enough beds,” said Pastor Art Speight of Cornerstone Christian Fellowship in Bremerton.

Speight is known for helping out at homeless feeds and assisting people that need a place to stay, including directing them to a shelter program.

All the different shelter agencies do a good job working together to help the homeless in the county, said Speight, adding that more money is needed for these programs.

Gregoire’s story, where even finding a temporary place to live, not permanent, is considered a victory over the obstacles faced by the many Kitsap County residents who are living in shelters, on couches, in their cars and in tents.

Kitsap Community Resources, one of Kitsap’s social services that helps homeless people find housing, had 132 families on a waiting list to get into emergency or transitional housing.

“And these are the families we know of,” said Sally Santana, local homeless advocate. “There are dozens and dozens of families out there who have not asked for help and are just suffering alone.”

Similar to Gregoire, Moriah Brown did not have a stable place to live and was staying with friends before landing at St. Vincent de Paul three weeks ago.

“I was bouncing around from house to house,” Brown, 29, said. “It wasn’t healthy.”

Brown, who moved to Bremerton from Mason County a year ago, is one math test away from receiving her GED from Olympic College and is also looking for a job. Support from the shelter employees, where clients receive individual, weekly checkups on their job and housing plans, was key to helping her turn her life around, she said.

Residents at the shelter are also responsible for chores such as cleaning and cooking.

“Being homeless, you have to prioritize what you need most,” Brown said, who has a 4-year-old son, Niko, to care for as well. She said that being at the shelter has helped her organize what she needs to do next.

“The shelter has inspired me to want to help people,” Brown added. She hopes to work as a physical therapist. But first she stresses she needs to get a job.

St. Vincent de Paul in Bremerton, known casually as St. Vinnie’s, has 17 beds and though three women left Tuesday morning, the spots were already claimed by new people midday for that night, said a shelter assistant. The shelter does not keep a waiting list but has had to turn women away when they reach capacity. Women are allowed to stay for 30 days and may be granted to extend their stay up to 90 days depending on the situation.

Through Catholic Community Services, Benedict House in Bremerton offers emergency shelter and transitional housing for single homeless men. Their shelter has 25 beds and as of Tuesday was full. On average, the shelter has about 25 men on the waiting list, said Mike Curry, director of the shelter.

“Sometimes we have to make nine calls before we get through to someone,” Brown said about the difficulties in contacting men on the waiting list. Many of them do not have a primary phone number. This makes the wait-time hard to determine.

Darrell Hood, 42, has been at Benedict House since March and said that a combination of things have led him here. Hood lost his scholarship to Olympic College because his grades dropped in 2008 but he continued to live with and care for his grandmother. But the winter of that year “it got to be too much” so he went from staying with a friend, to an abandoned building and even spent nights inside his church’s building with the permission from the pastor before finding the Benedict House. Other family members took over caring for his grandmother.

“I was expecting a zoo,” said Hood of the shelter, admitting that he had preconceived stereotypes. “This is not what I expected at all. These are good guys here.”

Hood was a painter by trade but went back to school for information technology because back problems were prohibiting from doing the labor-related work. He is a quarter’s worth of classes shy of earning his degree.

“There is accountability on how you spend your time,” Hood said, adding that they receive case management and are responsible for household chores. He is looking for work and had an interview Tuesday.

Paul Dolan, 47, another man staying at Benedict House who never expected he would be homeless, puts it like this: “I”ve seen the world from the other side of the coin.”

There were 1,756 self-reported Kitsap County homeless people in September, according to the state Department of Social and Health Services. The number has increased from the reported 1,473 homeless people in October of last year.