The Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers (MAPS) vacated its Somerville office of 45 years on Friday, August 25, 2023, following an order by the city to leave the 92 Union Square building by the end of the month due to its unsafe conditions.

The nonprofit organization is still seeking a smaller location that would allow it to continue to offer some of its crucial health and social services to the large Portuguese-speaking community in the city, but after searching for more than two years, MAPS has not been able to find an affordable and accessible space that meets its needs.

In 2019, the City of Somerville informed MAPS and the Somerville Media Center that the space would have to be vacated in order the undergo urgent repairs. The process was paused with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and for the past two years both organizations have worked with city officials to find a new space. MAPS received $103,000 in federal COVID-19 relief funds last year to support its relocations efforts.

“We are sad to leave a space that our organization and community have called home for the past 45 years,” said MAPS CEO Paulo Pinto, MPA. “Our organization started in Somerville, and so we hope to find a new, smaller location soon that would allow us to keep our essential presence in the city.”

For now, MAPS is directing Somerville community members to contact the nearby Cambridge office at 1046 Cambridge Street if they need assistance by calling 617-864-7600. The organization will continue to offer weekly Driver Alcohol Education and Intimate Partner Abuse Educational Program classes remotely until it finds a new location. MAPS plans to secure a space in Somerville soon that will operate by appointment only and serve as a base for outreach, weekly health clinics, health insurance enrollment and citizenship drives, and other community events.

“This is a difficult time for MAPS and our community,” said Pinto. “We have been part of the fabric of the city for 5 decades and played a critical role in helping build and create the progress that the city is experiencing, but unfortunately, we are now being pushed out.”

MAPS started as two separate organizations in 1970, one being SPAL, the Somerville Portuguese-American League, which began serving the Portuguese-American community in the late 60s. SPAL merged with COPA, the Cambridge Organization of Portuguese Americans, in 1993 to form the Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers, officially welcoming the entire Portuguese-speaking community which both organizations had served since their creation.

Over its almost 50 years in the Union Square office, MAPS helped countless members of the Portuguese-speaking community and others with a variety of essential and often innovative health and social services, including HIV/STI prevention and screening, youth programs, substance abuse prevention, immigrant integration, citizenship assistance, family support and stabilization, in-home therapy, support for victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, and the first-ever licensed acupuncture detox clinic in the country.