Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Rotating Homeless Shelter

If you read the post on August 25, Grieving God's Heart, you know about the homeless situation in Elkton. The Meeting Ground is the non profit parent of two of the three homeless shelters in our County. They are spear heading a movement among the churches to establish a rotating homeless shelter that would move from church to church from November 7 to March 18.

The churches will offer the shelter between 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. We would pick up folks from a designated place, transport them to the shelter site, and then take them back in the morning. The church would provide dinner, breakfast, and a bag lunch for 20-25 men, women, and children. The guests would be screened by the Meeting Ground and required to adhere to shelter rules. In addition to providing shelter from the cold, the shelter would provide a place for homeless folks to connect with social services to work to move them into jobs, housing, and addiction treatment.

We will be discussing this at the Administrative Council meetings at Town Point (7p.m. 9/19) and Trinity (7p.m.9/26). My hope is that we will decide to host 2-3 weeks of the 25 weeks the shelter is open. It will take a volunteer team of site supervisor and 15-20 servants to make this happen for the week.

I am interested to hear feedback and ideas from within and outside of our community.

2 comments:

  1. Such a great idea.
    There are lot of churches in Bham and Huntsville that participate in this. It is called I think the .
    Hope it goes well with you all.

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  2. That sounds like what Interfaith Hospitality Network does. It works well.

    ReplyDelete