Living Hope had to move when First Baptist Church, where they’d been for several years, underwent renovations. They’d planned to buy the former Sorrow Drowner building, but had to go back to the drawing board after failing to reach a consensus with nearby residents — even though the spot met a lot of their day shelter needs, including a kitchen, restrooms, and a location along a commercial corridor.
They had to go back to the drawing board when a consensus couldn't be reached between the center and many of the residents of the surrounding neighborhood.
This will leave a significant gap in resources for the unhoused, and the social workers and service providers who help them, according to Pastor Meg McBride of Hope Recovery Faith Community.
McBride is also the executive director of the Warming Shelter, an emergency, overnight pop-up shelter that opens when the overnight temperature is forecast to drop below 30'F for two consecutive nights. The facility splits the responsibility of caring for the unhoused with Living Hope’s day shelter.
“Last year our guests would stay with us overnight, and then we would send them over to Living Hope where they would stay for the day, and then they would come right back to us in the late afternoon and stay with us for dinner in the evening,” McBride said.
“The day center is definitely very much needed, or a day space where unsheltered people can go," she said. "Not only, of course, I think the most important thing is for rest, but also to access services like bathroom, food, right?... people were able at the day center to meet with a social worker who was able to help them with food stamps and social security disability and Medicaid and housing and all of those things. That's a real gap in our community right now.”
The gap is pronounced when winter is on our heels, McBride said.
"So how is that going to change our logistics here and the way that we function? There are some people that can't go to the public library. I'm not sure what other daytime spaces people are going to, especially when the weather is bad," she said.
The adverse effects of this missing community resource can be devastating to people.
“I have a couple specific folks that have recently had a bout of where they were housed because someone wanted financial gain and offered them a housing situation, which was too good to be true,” McBride said. “And literally a week later, it turned out it was an apartment where someone had been evicted, and someone was trying to like turn it for a couple weeks to make a few more bucks off of it.”
Situations like that can be especially tough on people trying to maintain sobriety or handle substance use issues while homeless.
“So they ended up going unhoused again. One individual in that couple was 27 months clean and sober,” McBride said the stress of the situation drove that individual to relapse.
“Just like this idea that you know I feel stable, and then the next minute I'm not,” she said. “They lost everything — the clothing they had acquired, their personal items. They had put this home together.”
WHQR reached out to Living Hope for a conversation; however, they declined our request.
However, co-founder of Living Hope Tony Perez did address the issue on Facebook.
“People experiencing homelessness are still people. They are our neighbors. They deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and they need places where they are not simply told where they cannot be, but are welcomed into spaces where they can begin taking meaningful steps forward," he wrote. "And for Living Hope, that raises another important question: Where can the work of helping them happen?”
As Living Hope is working to answer that question, McBride said she’s gearing up to run the warming shelter. But in the meantime she’s focusing on helping a couple of people at a time keep the momentum going.
“But when it gets cold out, I will have all, many of them back in, you know, back in with us. And then my team and I, right, will be case managing and trying to help people wherever we can,” Bride said. “Last year we helped 15 people. Yeah, either go to detox, move into a recovery house, or make some choices that, you know, broke their cycles of homelessness. And so my team is really good at that.”
