Wayne housing program increases winter services
This winter the shelter will open at the Salvation Army in Wooster on days when the temperature is below 20 F and allow those served to spend the night.
Those seeking shelter from the cold temperatures in Wayne County this winter will benefit from a severe-weather program that is increasing its service by lowering the temperature at which it’s available from temperatures below 9 F in the past to temperatures below 20 F this year.
“We’ll see how this goes, and maybe we’ll even be able to help more next year,” special projects coordinator Krista Kidney said.
The committee managing the program is made up of the Wayne County Housing Coalition and partner agencies including OneEighty, the Salvation Army, the Wayne Metropolitan Housing Association, United Way, Wayne County Emergency Management and several community churches.
“The shelter will open at the Salvation Army on days when the temperature is below 20 degrees and allow those we serve to spend the night,” Kidney said.
The shelter is open to anyone — no questions asked — and includes dinner, breakfast, snacks in between, and showers and a cot or bed.
Kidney said the United Way gave the program $5,000 to get started.
“We will be able to reimburse the Salvation Army for their costs and pay an independent contractor to run the shelter between 6 p.m. and 8 in the morning. Church volunteers will help during the hours of 6 and 10 p.m.,” Kidney said.
Last year the shelter was open six nights over three cold snaps and served 10 people.
“We really have no idea what to expect this year, although of course we anticipate more due to our opening for the higher temperatures,” Kidney said. “The Salvation Army has the means to provide more than that if necessary.”
Shelter is available for men, women and families.
“Some of the people staying might discover they are available for other services and resources,” Kidney said.
Kidney said the impetus behind the change was a College of Wooster study that looked at affordable housing and homelessness in Wayne County. Sponsors of the study included The Donald and Alice Noble Foundation, Wayne County Community Foundation, The Ralph R. and Grace B. Jones Foundation, and Laura B. Frick Charitable Trust.
In summer 2019, the College of Wooster’s Applied Methods and Research Experience program partnered with 12 community stakeholders to research homelessness and affordable housing in Wayne County. AMRE appointed three students, Camille Carr, Halen Gifford and Eduardo Vetancourt, to be consultants on this project for the summer.
The student consulting team was able to compose a series of short-term and long-term recommendations for the stakeholders under the guidance of their advisors — Dr. Brooke Krause from the College of Wooster department of economics and Nate Addington, the college’s director of experiential learning and community engagement.
Throughout the eight weeks of the program, the team engaged in a number of activities to achieve this goal including meetings with stakeholders and other community members, researching successful practices in similar and dissimilar communities, assessing the Wayne County shelter system, evaluating the state of homelessness and affordable housing in Wayne County, and using the geographic information system tool ArcGIS to identify all tax-delinquent Wayne County properties.
The study said, “While homelessness in Wayne County may not be as visible as it is in large metropolitan areas, that does not make it less of an issue. Much like other communities, homelessness in Wayne County has emerged as a chronic social issue in the past few decades.”