When an overnight warming center in Brunswick announced it was closing this spring, it portended a regional crisis.
A point-in-time count conducted this January found 119 homeless people in midcoast Maine. Most of them relied on shelters like the one run by Tedford Housing in Brunswick or transitional housing. But a smaller group is unsheltered. For the last four years, they have relied on the Gathering Place, the region’s only warming center, for shelter at night.
“We tend to have people land here,” Brunswick Town Manager Julia Henze said. “We’re the biggest town in this area. On our border are all smaller places, and they don’t have these kinds of services.”
The Gathering Place is a primarily volunteer-run organization that also operates a daytime program. In May, its stretched leaders reached out to Tedford to let it know the organizers would be closing the overnight shelter. Tedford agreed to find a site for a new center and come up with a plan to operate it, but it was a monumental task with only months to go before the cold season.
The community took it from there. Area officials, housing developers, faith leaders and even the Midcoast Hospital convened. The director of the Bath-area YMCA landed on the winning site: a community service center run by Brunswick’s Adventist church, which agreed to lease Tedford the space for the winter and give them an option to purchase it next year.
“They had run a clothing bank out of that building for years as a part of their ministry,” said Andrew Lardie, the executive director of Tedford Housing. “That was how they understood their way to worship and to make an impact in the world. This cause was totally compatible with that approach.”
The effort shows how difficult it can be to provide these crucial services. On a tight deadline, Tedford was one of 12 overnight warming shelters that got money from a MaineHousing fund to operate through the winter. It was not the only one to get money that was on the edge, since Bangor’s Hope House was due to close in December before a nonprofit stepped in.
Tedford got just under $256,000 to renovate and operate in their new space. Commonspace, a Portland-based nonprofit, was also awarded $225,000 to open an overnight warming shelter at their recovery facility based in Bath, bracketing the immediate region with two options along transit corridors. Both Tedford and commonspace hope to open by Nov. 15.
Nearly 50 people can be accommodated between the two shelters, which would be more than enough to fill the gap created with the closure this spring, going by MaineHousing’s point-in-time count. Both shelters will be low-barrier, meaning criminal background checks, income verification, sobriety and identification are not required for a person to stay there.
“It’s kind of perfect: Two different shelter resources serving up what is actually, of course, a very broad, expansive area,” Townsend said.
The only remaining challenge, since both organizations have now hired the requisite staff to operate the centers, is renovating these spaces into shelters that can accommodate overnight guests.
Luckily, the community has pitched in on that front, too. Lardie said Brunswick’s Berean Baptist Church and the local Lowe’s have both sent over groups of volunteers to offer free labor.
Local electricians and plumbers, usually booked up for months, have cleared their schedules to help with construction work, including designing and installing a new sprinkler system, Lardie said. Townsend is still looking for a contractor to install a washer and dryer in Bath.
If all goes well this winter, the hope is both commonspace and Tedford — which is already expanding its existing shelter in Brunswick — will continue to operate these centers long term.
“Everybody has their own way of being able to support this work and support the guests and the clients and the tenants that Tedford is supporting,” Lardie said. “We’ve had a phenomenal response, [people are] going above and beyond to find a way to help us get this to the finish line in time for opening.”
