After it appeared that it might not exist at all, Concord’s emergency winter shelter for its homeless residents stands to look quite familiar when it opens, probably early in January.
Its location, the activity center of St. Peter’s Church, and its manager, the Friends Program, will be the same as last year.
The Friends Program, a nonprofit stretched thin between its four missions, announced Thursday that it agreed to step in and organize volunteer efforts at the emergency shelter for a second year. Its executive director, Jerry Madden, had said he was almost certain it wouldn’t be able to repeat its role – unless the perfect location were found.
It appeared at first that the St. Peter’s Church location at 135 N. Main St., which Madden said was nearly ideal, wouldn’t be available. The church is up for sale and has two potential buyers who are “very interested,” said Charlie Burr, the parish’s business manager. It also was planned to serve various uses for the parishioners and the Cub Scouts, he said.
But as temperatures dipped and the month dragged on, no other organizations materialized that could fill the gap in the capital city’s safety net, which would have offered no emergency shelter for the city’s most troubled, homeless residents, especially those battling active addictions.
“Being a Catholic church, we couldn’t see people freezing, you know, because there wasn’t a shelter available somewhere,” Burr said. “There’s no way we could say no. There just wasn’t.”
Although the church may be sold this year – after nearly three years on the market – the potential buyers had no qualms with it hosting the shelter for another winter, Burr said.
“Even if they put in a bid today, they’re looking at literally six months of due diligence and getting permitting and zoning and all that stuff,” he said.
So, with those issues settled, the Friends Program began Thursday tackling its next challenge: staffing volunteers.
Madden said he’d prefer to open the shelter as soon as possible, but he doesn’t see it happening until Jan. 4 at the earliest.
“The bottom line is I don’t have a firm open date yet, mainly because we have to populate these shifts,” Madden said.
The shelter will require about 10 volunteers a day, four at evening check-in, four overnight and two for check-out. That’s 888 volunteer shifts to be filled, Madden said, noting that he’d prefer to have the coming two weeks fully planned at any given time.
The check-out shifts are the shortest, from 6 to 7:30 a.m.; the check-in shifts span 6:45 to 9:30 p.m; and the overnight shifts go from 6:45 p.m. to 7 a.m.
People who are interested in volunteering can pick individual shifts using an online tool, which resulted in nearly 20 percent of the total demand being filled in a matter of hours, Madden said. It’s available at signup.com/go/fQGoxd.
Otherwise, Madden said he’s also looking for volunteers who can assist on an on-call basis to coverage shortages or cancellations. Those people can identify certain times that will work for them directly to his email at jmadden@friendsprogram.org.
“The most critical piece of running the shelter is you, the volunteer,” Madden wrote in an email to more than 200 previous volunteers. “We cannot manage the shelter operations without you and until we know that we have enough volunteers committed, the shelter will not open.”
Overnight Thursday, the temperature in Concord was projected to plunge to -1 degrees.
“It’s too bad it’s not going to open tonight,” Burr said. “I mean, it is going to be really cold tonight, but I know they have to get staffing, they have to get volunteers, they have to get the cots, the blankets.”
And by next year, the city may have to get a new host location, too.
“We were hoping we wouldn’t own the property this year,” Burr said. “I just think that the city and agencies involved in homelessness just have to kind of figure out something permanent for the city of Concord. It’s obviously a real need.”
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)