 to another episode of In the Studio. My name is Lynn Weaver, and our guests today are Kelsey Gaylor, they are here, welcome. They're here to talk about the interfaith rotating winter shelter of Davis. I'm going to start with you, Eric, and I'm going to ask you, what is the interfaith rotating winter shelter? So the interfaith rotating winter shelter is a homeless shelter that is entirely run by volunteers in Davis. It operates with the help of local congregations, 10 local congregations, well many more local congregations, but 10 specific ones in Davis, all of them in Davis, that host 25 to 40 homeless individuals each night and they all take a week and then we rotate every week through them and for 15 weeks out of the year we're able to have a homeless shelter. Tell me a little bit about you, what do you do and how did you come to be involved with this wonderful initiative? Yeah, so like I mentioned, we're an all-volunteer shelter, so I'm a volunteer, I'm the chair of the board of directors and I came to be involved through my church. I did a lot of the driving for the shelter, driving homeless guests around, and then I was so good at that that they promoted me to be in charge of the driving and I was so good at that that they promoted me to being on the board of directors and I guess I was really good at that so they made me chair of the board of directors. How much of your time do you spend dealing with the... So it varies greatly depending on the time of year. When this shelter is open from late November to mid-March, it's probably 20 to 20 hours a week. During the rest of the year, when it's just kind of board meetings and policy decisions, it's maybe 10 to 20 hours a month. Oh, that's very, very nice. And I would say, how many people do you serve, roughly? Yeah, so we house 25 to 40 individuals per night. It depends on how many people come and then also what shelter site we're at. Some are bigger than others. Each year we house our help about 120, 140 individuals and unique individuals every season. How do the homeless people come to you or how do you find them? So we don't find them, they find us. But we have one central site that never changes where we're doing intake processing every night. Yes, sort of like a triage. Yeah, kind of like a triage and we also... So we try not to turn anyone away, but we want to make sure that anybody that comes in is capable of being safe and being part of a community because when you're in a big room sleeping with people, you know, you have to be... You can't be off your... Yes, of course. You can't be disrupted. You can't be disrupted. You have to be able to obey and that sort of thing. Yes. So it's kind of a triage and it's just to make sure that everything that happens actually in the shelter is okay. Is okay, yes. But we try not to turn people away for being drunk or being under the influence. We're the only shelter in Yolo County that will take people that are on alcohol or on drugs. Well, that's very interesting because that's later I'm going to ask you a little bit about what kind of support there is at the level of the county and also the state in a way. But now I'm going to, Kelsey, how did you learn about the shelter? And I understand you were a student now or a graduate student. I'm not currently a student. I learned about the shelter in my last year at UC Davis in 2014. I was at a meeting for a future career in healthcare and I stumbled across a flyer and I was lucky enough to meet one of the people who helps is very involved in the shelter, Linda Scott. And so we chatted about the shelter and I applied and was accepted into the program to be an intern. So very fortunate. And how long did you serve as a volunteer for the center? I've been in different positions but this will be my fourth year volunteering for IRWS. That's a wonderful thing. I want to go back to Eric. Where do the guests come from, the homeless population? What type of population group are they? So there are, in Davis there are kind of two subsets of homeless individuals. The first are people that have been in Davis for years long term, if you will. Some of them grew up in Davis. Some of them moved to Davis to start careers and then ended up on the streets somehow. But they've been here for a long time. The other ones are kind of transient people and they're just moving around some of them perpetually a lot of times for, and they just come through Davis for a couple of days, maybe a week, and then they move on to somewhere else. That's interesting. I came across a diagram or a picture of a statistics and perhaps we can have it up on the screen that shows it's a cross cut of homeless on the night of the 23rd of January, 2017. And it shows a breakdown of Davis and homeless sheltered, homeless semi-sheltered and homeless unsheltered. The blue one being sheltered, the hybrid is the red and the other one is the unsheltered. And there's a comparison between Davis, Woodland and Yolo County. So it is a little difficult to see, but hopefully when you stream it on our website, you'll be able to view it in a Zoom form. So Eric, do you approximately, how many homeless do we have in Davis particularly? So it's difficult to say. It's approximately 120 to 130. It's quite a lot then. Yeah, it is quite a lot of people. And the goal of the center is of course to be helpful to people who are not fortunate, but also specifically is to, well, tell me about the goals are. So our goal is to provide shelter. That's the sole purpose of IRWS. Especially during the winter. And then especially during the winter months because it's cold and wet and rainy and nobody wants to be out. Yes, that's right. And the physical location of these rooms, where are they? So there are different congregations around Davis. You said about 10. About 10. You can probably see them if you look at a map of churches in Davis, but it's anywhere from Davis Community Church in downtown Davis, the University Covenant Church all the way on a mace or First Baptist Church. That's three. I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to list the others. No, no, but the whole spectrum. The whole spectrum, yeah. Yes, yes. So any church that doesn't have a nursery school attached to it is probably a part of IRWS. Yes, and of course, you also provide food for the night, yes. And that is provided by volunteers. And maybe I come to Kelsley again to ask her what do the volunteers do? There are various roles and you've been in several of them. Can you list them what the volunteers do? Yeah, and feel free, Eric, to jump in because he has a holistic understanding of the entire operation. Yes. So volunteers are anywhere from actually serving it intake, which was the triage center to driving the homeless guest from triage to the different congregations. And then in the congregation, we have volunteers serving meals. We also have the interns helping pass out sleeping bags and helping guests with generally whatever they need, giving them toothpaste, socks, things of that nature. And so we also have overnight volunteers, which are volunteers that will come and stay with the guests overnight just to monitor. To monitor, but also to provide extra support and help the guests with whatever they need. And so we pretty much have volunteers in every possible role. And so I have served as an intern passing out sleeping bags, but I've also served in the senior intern position, which is educating other interns on the operations of the shelter. It's wonderful. And the question that comes to mind, Kelsey, and also Eric, what is the response of these homeless people? How, Kelsey, what was your impression? What did they say to you that was either positive or negative? I've had many positive interactions with the homeless community, sharing stories about their lives and learning about different cultures that they come from and how they've grown up. Generally, I would say they are very warm and positive towards the volunteers, and I've had many positive experiences with them. Well, while I'm asking Eric of the same question, perhaps you can think of one particular case that moved you or angered you or whatever. So Eric, what do you think the homeless think about this? So, they're very, I mean, I think they're very grateful for it. You know, they appreciate having a place to sleep that's warm and dry and having a hot meal. They don't get very many of them. The thing that stands out, Kelsey kind of mentioned that they come from a variety of backgrounds. And the thing that really, when I started this, he's kind of, I was driving, right? So you have like four or five minutes when you can talk with them in a car. And I would ask them about their backgrounds. And a lot of them, you know, had careers, had things going for them and then, you know, something happened and they ended up on the street. And you always, it will always surprise me, the variety of backgrounds that people would come from and end up as homeless individuals. That's very nice, a very interesting response. And if you can't think of any particular anecdote, it doesn't matter. No, no, I can think of one. So I had befriended or, you know, developed a relationship with one of the homeless guests who I really enjoyed, you know, having dinner at the shelter with and learning about his background. And one of the evenings, he had come up to me and he was at UC Davis graduation for some reason and he had bought like a T-shirt and it had all of our names that were listed that were graduating and he gave it to me and he just said that I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate what IRWS provides and how grateful all of us are as a community for this shelter. And so I think that that interaction has really stuck with me because I think that it shows that as an intern, you can learn a lot about the people that come to the shelter as Eric had said and also that they appreciate what we're doing for them. It's a very good story and very nice and that brings up my other question is, how did this experience serving as a volunteer for the interfaith rotating winter shelter changed your outlook on life? So it's changed my outlook on life in having a better understanding of the variety of ways that people can wind up homeless. Like Eric said, it's surprising at times to see people with masters, people with very strong professional careers finding themselves in this situation. So I think that it was a good experience in learning about the fact that we are not so different from each other, the homeless and people that are sheltered that there's more similarities than differences. Very good, very good. Now, I mentioned earlier that yeah, do you have the Yolo County or the City of Davis provide a lot of support for homeless? Yeah, so we're very fortunate to count with the city's support. They've given, they've given us financial support and this year we're actually going to use one of their facilities as our intake site. Good. And they're starting to see the need and have more resources available for homeless outreach, really. Well, I'm afraid our time is up. It went very quickly. I know, Eric, you're always looking for volunteers and your website will be on display. And so if you'd like to consider having an experience with the shelter, please contact Eric and through the website. And Kelsey, the best of luck for your life and thank you both for coming, giving us the time and telling us about the shelter. So as I said, I'm afraid our time is up. Thank you all for watching. And if you'd like to see this program again, you can stream it at dctv.davismedia.org. And also while you're there, you can check out some of our other programs. We have wonderful topics and outstanding guests. So thank you, Kelsey and Eric and from all of us here at Davis Media, thank you so much for watching and see you next time.