MORGANTOWN — It’s Tuesday morning as these words are typed, the eve of the March 15 closure of the Monongalia County Warming Shelter.
It’s 29 degrees and blowing snow.
Now what?
“I can’t sleep at night because I know all these folks who are going to be on the street again, in tents,” Joni Costante said. “They’re being told they have to go. Again. Where? Where are they supposed to go?”
Costante was among a group of shelter volunteers and organizers who sat down with The Dominion Post to discuss the seasonal shelter’s closure, lessons learned and hopes for the future.
Initially funded by matching $38,041 contributions from Morgantown City Council and the Monongalia County Commission, as well as $15,000 from the Mylan Puskar Foundation and $5,500 from Your Community Foundation, the shelter opened on Dec. 1.
In 105 days of operation at Hazel’s House of Hope (H3), the shelter has been a refuge from the cold and a lightning rod for social media commentary.
It’s also been full.
“We were expecting maybe 15, 20, 25 people. Within a couple weeks, we were at 50. When the cold weather hit over the holidays, we had 84 people in our building,” Becky Rodd said. “Since then, the shelter has been running an average of 63 people a night.”
All told, 194 individuals had slept at least one night at the shelter as of Monday afternoon.
Another 50-60 individuals — primarily families with children or expectant mothers — have used a hotel program through RAMP, a volunteer group working through the First Presbyterian Church. The majority of those people were connected with supportive housing.
Rodd, who’s been living at and running the shelter along with Costante and volunteers like Alice Meehan, said working with the individuals and organizations like Milan Puskar Health Right, Bartlett Housing Solutions, RAMP and the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness has resulted in about half of the shelter’s regulars being able to identify a plan going forward.
“Of those, 11% will get permanent housing thanks to the work of the Health Right case managers, who’ve been really working intensively. Others will go into other shelters, like Bartlett [House], or into a situation with family and friends,” Rodd said. “But that means that a little over 50% will go back out on the streets.”
Rodd concedes the warming shelter’s operation was intentionally less restrictive in terms of structure and expectations than places like Bartlett House. She also knows that’s caused some to question its value.
“We deal with a lot of people dealing with mental health issues, substance abuse issues, histories of trauma, abuse, kind of severe life history issues,” she said. “Bartlett House is highly structured for people focused on getting into their housing program fairly quickly.”
Brian Butcher, Morgantown City Council’s 7th Ward representative, worked closely with the shelter as an organizer with RAMP.
Butcher said there is a false perception spread in places like social media that the shelter is keeping people from using more structured options like Bartlett House.
The truth, he said, is that some of the people using these services have fairly simple barriers for housing, like lost identification and unpaid utility bills. Others, he said, have a long list of barriers, including addiction, mental health challenges and abusive relationships that make it difficult to be in a structured environment.
“When we talk to most people, you’d be surprised at how much they are cognizant of their capacity to be in structure or housing. They’ll tell you, ‘No, I can’t be in an apartment right now.’ ” Butcher said. “Bartlett [House] can’t be one-size-fits-all. They try to be as broad as they can while keeping the clientele they have safe because some people really need that kind of structure, but it will not work for everyone.”
Butcher said he and Rodd have been in constant contact with Bartlett House Executive Director Keri DeMasi and work closely with Milan Puskar Health Right and WVCEH, among others.
That, they all agree, is one of the major takeaways from this warming shelter experience — the territorial squabbles, philosophical differences and personal animosities of the past have largely been quashed by a collective realization of what’s facing the community.
“I think we’re coming out of that in a lot of ways because we’ve hit a flash point where we all see a crisis together and we understand that none of us can solve it alone,” Butcher said. “It really doesn’t matter how anybody feels about one another, especially personally. You can feel however you like, but we’ve got to have a common goal.”
