 Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland Public Television with host Bethany Wesley. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, for information available at BemidjiAirPort.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswa Tax Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at NiswaTax.com. Welcome back to Lakeland Currents. I'm Bethany Wesley. Tonight, as we get started, I'd encourage you to take inventory of where you are at. Are you on a couch, in a chair, watching this program on a television, or maybe a computer or a tablet? Temperatures have dropped recently, so you maybe have wrapped a blanket around yourself or lit a fireplace at your feet. Well, tonight we're going to turn our attention to those who don't have those comforts or luxuries. Every three years, the Wilder Foundation in St. Paul conducts a one-night survey of the homeless population throughout Minnesota. In the last survey conducted in October 2015, it revealed that there were more than 93 homeless individuals in the state, not including those on American Indian reservations. In the 12-county region defined as Northwestern Minnesota, there were 420 homeless individuals. But those counts admittedly underestimate the number of people likely experiencing homelessness, since many people experiencing homelessness do so outside of a shelter system. It is estimated that more than 15,000 Minnesotans were homeless in 2015. In Bemidji, there are a few options available for those without housing, but for tonight, we will focus on one in particular. The Wolf Center, a unique shelter that opened in 2016. Joining me tonight is Reid Olson, the chairman of the Nameless Coalition for the Homeless, which operates the Wolf Center. He's going to help us understand what exactly makes this shelter different and who it serves. Hi, Weed. Hi. Welcome. It's good to be here. So before we turn to the shelter itself, we want to kind of set the stage and go back a few years, because something was happening. Community members were seeing a problem. And so what was happening that led to what later became the coalition? What kind of got you and the community talking? Well, in the past years, there's been a number of weather and alcohol-related deaths in our community. Usually about two or three a winter, I think is a rough estimate. And I would also like to give some credit to Justin Glau, who used to be a reporter at The Pioneer. He ran a number of stories kind of showcasing who people were that were living on the streets in Bemidji and kind of gave a face to the homeless in Bemidji. And so after a couple of people passed away, I think it was in October of 2013, a group of people met at the library. And then we met again, I believe, at People's Church and then started meeting regularly to try and figure out what the community needed, what we might be able to do to help stem that tide. And it took us a while. I think we met for about six months before we really figured out what we were going to do, what slice of the pie we were going to try and take, what we thought we could achieve and decided that a shelter that catered to homeless people with chemical dependency issues was something that we would be able to do. We thought in October when we first met that we would be able to open one up by Christmas and it took us about two years and four months to get it done. But relatively speaking, I think it was a pretty good turnaround to open up a facility. You officially opened, I believe, was it February of 2016? Yep. And so let's talk about the shelter itself for just a second and we'll turn to the guests in just a minute. But where is it located? It's located at 522 America Avenue. It is a 16-bed facility. We're open from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. and you don't have to sign up ahead of time. There's a very simple intake process, but it's just a simple first-come-first-serve. And when they come in, people have access to laundry facilities, showers, clothes if they need new clothes. So it's very bearable and it's a real shoestring budget. Basically, our goal is we are going to keep you safe and warm and alive tonight. What was it about this shelter in particular that's unique? Because there are other shelter options out there in Bemidji specifically. But this one serves a unique population. In what way? Well, the servants of shelter that helps people, but they don't take in anybody that's been drinking, which is aptly understandable. We really try to focus on those people with chemical dependency issues. People's Church takes in all comers, I guess, I'd say. So one of our hopes was that we would take some of the pressure off of People's Church and take in some of the people that would otherwise stay there. So we are somewhat unique in that our main focus is on someone who has been drinking. Most of the people that stay with us, although when we can talk about this later, we've been getting away from our target demographic, but usually the majority of the people that are staying with us have been drinking that day that they stay with us. Fair to say there's less focus on families then? Is it more of an individual-based? Yes, we don't do families. It is purely individuals. It wouldn't be appropriate to have children in our setting, I don't think. Most of the people that we serve have some sort of untreated mental illness. Not everybody, but it's common. And as I said, most people have been drinking, so it probably wouldn't be a very good atmosphere for children. Is it staffed? Do you have somebody there who's kind of supervising or is it pretty open? Yes, no, it's staffed. It's absolutely staffed. And that's probably our biggest constraint to our operations is funding for staff, you know, is labor costs. But yes, there's always someone there. And we have a great staff. Our manager, Marcus, has been there now since we've opened and has a great relationship with the people that we serve. And that's really what makes it a success, is that the respect that our staff gives the people that we serve and the relationship that they've been able to build. Would you consider it a wet shelter? Like if people show up and they want to keep drinking, can they do that on site? Is it put away? No. Okay. Yeah, so if someone, when someone comes in, they're asked if they have any drugs or alcohol on them. And if they have alcohol, we will put it in a, we have basically a closet and we'll mark it with their name and lock it in the closet and then give it back to them in the morning. So people can come in intoxicated and with alcohol will remove the alcohol. And what that does, it might seem counterintuitive. Some people have thought that maybe that's enabling people to drink. But by allowing them to have a safe place to keep their alcohol overnight, it gives them that security to know that it's not going to get stolen. And it also relieves the pressure, because if you buy a bottle in the morning and you know that if you fall asleep tonight at one of the camps or out on the streets, it's probably going to get taken from you or you're going to lose it or something like that. So then the impulse then is to finish the bottle, is to drink it all so that you don't lose any of it. So we give them a little bit of security so they can drink less of it, knowing that it's going to be safe overnight and that they'll have it in the morning. So it does have the reverse effect of maybe even moderating the amount that people will drink. If there was someone who decided, for whatever reason, while they were on site, that maybe they do want to get help. Is your staff member able to direct them or give them resources to where they could go if that wasn't the case? Yes, but that's kind of a line that we draw where we don't push anything on anybody. We want it to be a very welcoming environment. So we don't try to put people into treatment or put people into counseling. If anybody asks us, then we're more than happy to direct them to resources, but we want it to come to be their choice and not something that we're putting on them because we want to make sure that everybody feels comfortable coming in and doesn't feel, they don't need to be brow-beaten. They know where they are and so we just try to give them a safe, respectful place. I want to talk just for a second about Park Place Apartments is a new development that is in the process of opening right now in Bemidji. It also provides a place for chronic ingredients dealing with different struggles. How is your shelter different than Park Place? Well, ours is an emergency overnight shelter and so that is our purview. We are looking for keeping someone safe tonight. Park Place is a permanent supportive housing, so it is an apartment building. The people that are staying there, they have leases, they have their own units, they come and go as they please just like anybody in an apartment building. Where we kind of dovetail, we're kind of maybe the first step on the continuum of treatment or of help for people where we've built that relationship with our guests and we can encourage them to apply to move into Park Place and gain a little more stability in their lives. We're similar in goals of trying to help people but we're quite different in how we operate and I think we really will see as Park Place fills up and as they begin, we'll see that we really complement one another. Would you say that you have a good relationship across all the different shelters and opportunities? Are you guys pretty good at talking with one another and saying if it doesn't work to fit you here, you could try X, Y or Z? I think so, yeah. I think that everybody is... We spend so much of our time trying to make sure that we can keep our doors open and be the biggest... The one thing that we can improve on the most is probably outreach and communicating with other people doing similar services but we have a pretty good relationship with People's Church and we have a good relationship with Park Place. Sandy Hennom from Village of Hope used to sit on our board as we were developing and she was really instrumental in us figuring out how to operate. So I think we do... we have a good relationship and it could always be improved. I want to turn to the numbers a little bit. So this is your second full winter. So how many did you serve last winter? Last winter, total numbers. I'm going to have to cheat here. I used to know this off the top of my head and I'm not going to be able to tell you. It was... I want to say we did 2900 individual stays and that's a guess. No, that's okay. People stay... Is there a limit? Can they stay repeatedly all winter long? Absolutely. People can come in as long as they want. In fact, I can say that in October percentage of clients was about 66% and November was 69%. So we do have a core group that we serve but then lots of people that come and stay for one or two nights at a time and then we maybe never see again or maybe then we'll stay a couple of times a month. Different people have much different scenarios or whatever where they're able to stay with some people part of the time and then they find themselves outside, so they'll come to us. Other people have nowhere to go and so they will stay with us continually. So you opened October 1st of the year, correct? So now we're about two... April to December now. Have you seen an increased need versus last winter? Are you seeing it kind of drop off? What are you kind of experiencing? Our October was very busy this year. It was, and I'm going to have to cheat again. Our October was... our total night stays was up about 73%. And so that was... we had 197 total bed stays in October of and this year we had 340. So it was quite an increase and it was really concerning for us because we only have 16 beds. So when you're already starting out right away in the milder months at that high level, we were afraid of what was going to happen come January or February. In November they've kind of leveled off and our increase was only about 9%. But I think along with that an interesting development is that the number of female clients that we're serving is going up quite a bit as well. We had 22 individual female clients in November this year up from 14 last year and we had 20 in October up from 8 the October the year previous. The other thing that we're noticing is the amount of people that we're serving that don't fit our target demographic is increasing. Our goal was really to serve the alcoholic homeless person in our minds male and now about 60 or 65% of the people that we serve fit that demographic. Other people are just people that find themselves homeless for a variety of reasons. They might be in between apartments or maybe they got evicted from an apartment or their family asked them to leave and they're looking for a new place and they're staying with us. So we're finding the scope of the people that we serve is really expanding and it's a concern of mine. I think when you hear about Park Place opening up and then the fact that the wolf is operating there's the village of Hope and servants of Shelter and so one might think well Bemidji's got it together there's plenty of options for everybody and that's really not the case but the hope is only able to take in so many people so many families at a time the servants of Shelter won't be and that's the churches that take turns a week at a time hosting as an emergency Shelter they're not opening this year until January. So I think that's part of the increase that we're seeing is the individuals that would otherwise stay at the servants of Shelter are coming to us but my real concern right now is when we opened we were looking at who is not being served in the community and it was people with chemical dependency homeless people with chemical dependency that were not being served now it seems like this pendulum has swung the other way and there's us and there's People's Church and there's Park Place that are all helping this demographic and the services that are for families and I think specifically of single mothers with children that are having a hard time finding housing their options have really shrunk and so that I think is the where we need to start looking now as far as more kind of addressed this gap and now you're seeing that maybe this other one might be either emerging or going bigger yes and looking forward if we want to keep the best way to render our facility unnecessary is to make sure that nobody finds themselves in the positions that we serve our in and that starts way back with children and if children that have stable housing tend to have stable housing as adults and vice versa children that don't have housing security as kids are more prone to have issues when they become adults so I think that the new focus in the community should be not that there hasn't been the focus already but we really need to renew our efforts on making sure that families and children have stable and adequate housing you just mentioned something about rendering yourself possibly unnecessary would that be how you define success later on was that the ultimate goal that is the goal and that was we called the when we first started talking with the we called the committee that was looking into it the stop gap committee we knew that park place was coming down the pike and we thought okay well we need something until they open up and that was kind of our initial goal but now that we've kind of and granted a lot of us are pretty naïve about what we're doing I don't know that we would have done it if we knew how difficult it would be but now I lost my train of thought but the stop gap so now that we've operated for a couple of years we see that there will always be that need for emergency shelter in the winter especially that even if you have permanent supportive housing options in the community you're not going to be able to turn around it still takes a number of days or weeks to get someone into one of those places and meanwhile there's other people for whatever reason that may be going back to square one that find themselves homeless tonight and it's 8 o'clock and it's 20 below and what am I going to do I think that there will always be the need to be there and then we can point people to services when they come in I want to turn a little bit to the funding to the operations so what is how much estimated does it take to operate the shelter then through the winter well we are trying to do our budget this year on much less than we did last year we've been struggling to find stable funding I'll back up and say when we first opened up we had so much support from the community it was really wonderful when we purchased the building the little church it needed a lot of remodeling because it was a new use we had to bring it up to current codes for everything and so we had to put in hand cap accessible bathrooms we had to put in a wheelchair elevator and a number of other things we had to do the estimate on that remodel was about $150,000 and I will quick give a shout out to Howie Zeta who volunteered to be our project manager and really leveraged his relationship with other contractors I think we spent about $30,000 as an organization because so many I won't be able to name them all but so many people stepped up yes from plumbing and drywall and insulation and wiring the trusses that we had to have put in the demo that was done everybody really stepped up windows and other supplies and stuff so we were able to do it about 10% of the cost well not 10% it would be 20% of the cost and so that was really wonderful but moving forward we can't as I say we can't just survive on bake sales and other events like that they're great for building awareness about us but so to get back to your question we're I think that ideally our shoe string budget would be about $100,000 a year this year we're looking at about $75,000 and next year it's about $10,000 less than that so we're pretty concerned about our future stability we're working on some grants hopefully smooth it all over and I believe that we'll find it that we'll be able to get the support that we need to be able to continue to operate because we have shown that we're a real asset to the community as far as keeping people out of the jail keeping people out of the emergency room the amount of cost savings I think sometimes it's difficult to prove a negative because we can't show how much we saved because that person never wound up in jail or never wound up in the ER you can't prove necessarily that they would have even though it makes sense that possibly that was the path but anecdotally we can show pretty confidently that we are saving the community a lot of money and giving people a safe place to be great so when you talk about getting grants do you look at it from a state perspective do you look at it locally we have a grant through the Office of Economic Opportunity which is out of the agency in the Department of Human Services at the state we're looking at a major foundation for another grant coming up here and then we have applied for some smaller grants in the community and now I'm going to not remember what any of them are but there are some local grants that we've been trying to get and every once in a while you might see us in the paper with the check and a handshake from various organizations a lot of churches have been really supportive of us and some other other nonprofits too have supported us and I've seen various drives like I believe there was one recently from Bemidji State Nursing Students who just developed a whole bunch of items to donate for you the community support is there you definitely have that do you feel like the community as a whole understands what you referenced earlier about the jail savings the hospital savings some of that detox situations is that harder to explain I think maybe that is a little bit harder to explain because it takes more than a quick sound bite or caption under a photograph but I think as I've tried to do outreach and as we've tried to build some of what we're doing that's something we'll always talk about and I really enjoy going and talking to church groups or civic organizations about what it is that we do and why it's important but that might be a little less understood but I think that most people just knowing that everybody knows that we have a homeless situation in Bemidji I think just knowing that people have a place to go is often enough for people to know what people are being cared for in addition to some of the drives that we've mentioned here we know that there are some events I believe you did like a ride for the homeless this summer and you have another event coming up here we do it's at Brigid's pub downtown Bemidji on December 30th the evening of December 30th is a Friday I believe the Friday after Christmas so we'll come on down and there'll be music and probably some more information we'll usually have a little booth where we can talk to people about what it is that we do and bring lots of cash as we close I want to kind of just talk about one of the bigger questions which is what do you say to those who say you know what the problem is kind of their own making it's kind of their own choosing if they want to get in these other shelter situations give up the booze how do you kind of respond to people who have that position well the short answers are wrong you know people that find themselves in this situation most of them have untreated mental health issues and this goes back to and we all you know the county right now is working on a two million dollar grant that is specifically a jail diversion program for people suffering from mental illness we know that we have not been treating our mentally ill and the result is that they become homeless all too often you know so and one thing that I say to people that if you can't if you don't understand how it is that they got there consider yourself very blessed you know it wasn't something that happened overnight it's a road that they've been on for a lifetime and the amount of often times the amount of tragedy that people have been through they get themselves to where they are is quite amazing the fact that they're as functional as they are sometimes I think is a minor miracle so we have to be careful judging people when we really don't understand what is behind the alcohol is often a self-medication it's not that people are lazy and don't want to work I think that a lot of times people are just in really bad straights well Reed I thank you for joining us and telling us about the shelter and about the work that went into it from the coalition standpoint thank you for watching us if you'd like to learn more about the center or the Nameless Coalition you can visit the website here on the bottom of your screen they have a Facebook page you can also stay tuned to Twitter I'm sure we'll be announcing more about that event coming up on the 30th so thank you for joining us tune in next week