David Webber, Columbia MISSOURIAN, December 2, 2023
With the Room at the Inn stabilizing its operation in one location, Loaves and Fishes looking for a new home and the opportunity campus breaking ground for a multi-purpose facility, it is a good time to look at the history our town’s organizations that have evolved into a homeless services network in the past two decades.
I was fortunate to be involved in the roots of Room at the Inn when I responded to a news article that the Missouri United Methodist Church on Ninth Street was keeping its doors open for homeless people to sleep. I recall it was January or February 2009 and it took place in MUMC’s second floor multi-purpose room due to a large snowstorm. The church’s pastor at the time, the Rev. Jim Bryan, and several other pastors of downtown churches had been cooperating on similar efforts.
Bryan once said, “I put out a call for donations, and money kept coming in, so I knew Columbia was ready to take action to care for the homeless.”
I helped set up cots and checked in guests but mostly drank coffee, played cards and talked with guests and volunteers well after my “shift” was over. I immediately adopted a “street level perspective” focusing on homelessness not so much as a public policy or social issue, but through the eyes and lives of real people.
Those experiences prepared me to write two plays. ”A Night at the Shelter” sheds light on the homeless community and those who help them and dozens of op-ed columns about homelessness.
Columbia homeless network that is best described, in 2023, by the roster of 24 nonprofit and governmental members of the Boone County Coalition to End Homelessness. In addition to conducting the annual point-in-time count twice a year organized as Project Homeless Connect, the coalition prioritizes housing resources in twice-a-month meetings of government and nonprofit organizations.
Before 2009, there were established organizations assisting the homeless community and people living in poverty. The Salvation Army’s Harbor House goes back until at least the mid-1980s, and it now provides temporary shelter, up to 90 days at a time, for about 50 adults. The Columbia Housing Authority Home operates Oak Towers, Paquin Towers and at least five other complexes and distributes hundreds of housing vouchers, with a waiting list of about 400 applications.
Additionally, the Food Bank for Central & Northeast Missouri, the Voluntary Action Center, and Love Columbia, all organize financial resources, volunteers and community knowledge to help needy Columbians obtain housing, jobs and transportation.
Back in 2009, relationships and organizations were less formal than they are today. I remember learning that something called the Columbia Interfaith Resource Center operated a “day center” at Seventh and Park Avenue across from the old Armory. They shared space with Loaves and Fishes, a soup kitchen founded by a Catholic Worker Community and several local churches in the early 1980s.
In early 2012, Wilkes Boulevard Methodist Church led by Pastor Meg Hegemann provided space for Loaves and Fishes and an expanded day center named Turning Point.
Room at the Inn continued in Missouri Methodist’s multipurpose room as a seasonal shelter until 2012 when it moved to an unoccupied garden center on Old 63 near Stephens Lake. They planned for 40 cots but were restricted by the fire department to 10 cots a night, although food and extra blankets were often provided by willing volunteers.
Until the 2020 pandemic, Room at the Inn rotated among at least six churches as a seasonal shelter from December to mid-March with about 50 cots and a light dinner staffed by hundreds of volunteers. In 2022, Room At the Inn moved to the Ashely Street Center, previously the VFW Hall, and sheltered about 60 people a night.
Loaves and Fishes, after a decade of being located at the Wilkes Church, is looking for a new home. It currently serves about 130 people a night, with dinner being provided and served by about 30 groups, mostly church groups, averaging about eight volunteers each, and about 15 additional volunteers who serve as greeters and monitors.
Just as Room at the Inn is presently dealing with fewer and less habitual volunteers in its new location, the current Loaves and Fishes model will face significant challenges in a new location while continuing the amazing feat of serving dinner nearly 365 days a year.
Columbia has invested the lions’ share of our $25 million American Rescue Plan Act funding to affordable housing and homeless services. The opportunity campus, to be organized by VAC and largely made possible by the city’s allocation of federal ARPA funds, is planning a shelter capacity of 125 cots, 12 months a year with 24/7 services. This is a giant step of a difference from the 2012 Room at the Inn in the Old 63 greenhouse with its pre-pandemic goal of 50 cots, and even his year’s capacity of 100 cots at the Ashley Street Center.
As I wrote last December, there is a fundamental difference between the volunteer provision of homeless services and the professional, paid provision of the same services. On one hand, the latter can be more consistent and informed; on the other hand, professional services routinely can become standardized with less attention to individual needs.
Look now and you see a transition from a largely volunteer shelter and food programs to government-funded and organized homelessness services but without clear and direct government oversight. This should concern Columbia citizens and leaders because 1. these nonprofits may not be prepared to govern themselves with their increased responsibilities; and
2. Columbia’s homeless population may increase to fill the new resources with a likely call for more government resources.
A secondary impact of government-funded nonprofits with full-time staff and “paid volunteers” is that the charitable volunteer experience of being your brothers’ and sisters’ keeper will be lost. Wasn’t that the point of starting Room at the Inn and Loaves and Fishes in the first place?
David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994
Webber Rough and Polished 