1 week Ago
When Encompass Community Supports and Culpeper Human Services opened the heat shelter at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church on Dec. 2, they were prepared to house up to 30 people during the coldest months of 2023 and 2024.
But when the snow came during the week of Jan. 6, moves had to be made to accommodate more people than they had initially intended. During a Human Services Board meeting on Jan.
15, Shelter Manager Lisa Esso reported on how they dealt with the accumulated snow. Culpeper County gained nearly 10 inches of snow according to the National Weather Service. According to Esso, the shelter filled up a week and a half after it opened and that those staying at the shelter are primarily Culpeper residents, half of them currently have employment.
“A lot of them are continuing to go out into the community and look for employment,” she said. Esso broke down the makeup of the shelter’s residents reporting that two-thirds of the shelter’s population are male and the remaining third are female. People are also reading.
.. When the snow came, the advisory staff from Encompass decided to expand access to the shelter.
The shelter manager said they added about 6–10 guests in order to get people out of the cold. Encompass also worked out a deal with the Sleepy Hollow Motel to house others; a similar arrangement had been made with the motel during the COVID pandemic in order to assure space between individuals to prevent spread of the virus. Esso said they were prepared to go this route again should there be more snowfall in the coming days.
She also complimented the volunteer staff of the heating shelter who “stepped up.” The shelter manager also thanked the board for allowing the shelter to use buses from the Kid Central program to transport shelter residents to areas set up for showers such as Culpeper Baptist Church. Esso also reported that between donations from the county, individuals and a $25,000 grant from the PATH Foundation the shelter was operating with a $97,000 budget, which will take the shelter up to its final day of operation at the end of March.
She said that this budget put the shelter in a “comfortable position.” Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | SoundStack | All Of Our Podcasts Esso reported no issues among the residents and also attributed that to the shelter’s staff. “They’re very good with surveying the situation,” she said.
“If they see something approaching the individual, deescalating it, let’s take a walk, let’s separate. It’s worked out really well. So far so good.
” As of this writing no one has had to be removed from the shelter. Also brought up during the meeting was where Culpeper Human Services was going to house people in the 2025-26 winter season. The availability of the warming shelter at St.
Luke’s after the end of the 2024-25 season has been questionable at best and the organization has been searching for a new location. Encompass will also not be available to partner with Human Services on running a new heat shelter. However, local organization Culpeper Housing and Shelter Service has expressed interest in taking a greater role in the endeavor, according to Human Services Director Lisa Peacock.
Peacock also serves as vice-chair on the board of CHASS. “I think we need to start having those discussions now,” said Peacock. “I don’t think we’re in a place where we’ll be able to raise the money to support a year-round, full-time shelter when we can’t put together a community effort to make sure that during the coldest months of the year that we’ve got a place where people can go.
” The board also briefly discussed the release of the 2023 National Point In Time Count, a program led by the U.S. Department of Housing that counts the number of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness.
This count is performed during a single night in January, which is planned and coordinated locally. According to that report, more than 600,000 people were experiencing homelessness on that single night in January 2023, a 12% increase from 2022. The report stated that a contributing factor in the rise of homelessness came from the wind-down or expiration of resources provided by President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which prevented a rise in homelessness between 2020-22.
Data provided in the report indicated that the rise in homelessness is largely due to a sharp increase in people who became homeless for the first time—increasing that number by 25% between the federal fiscal years of 2021-22. This coincided with an 8% increase of people who exited homelessness and entered permanent housing. According to Peacock, an interesting data point from the count shows that more seniors ages 60 and older have experienced displacement across the United States.
The report indicates that more than a quarter of adults experiencing homelessness were over age 54. Twenty percent or 98,393 individuals were between the ages of 55–64 while another 8% or 39,696 individuals were over age 64. Peacock said that particular cohort of older people make up the majority of individuals currently staying at the heating shelter.
Human Services has also worked with other organizations such as the Salvation Army for places that can house families experiencing homelessness. “We try to brainstorm about what we have, what resources are available to them,” said Peacock. Local Weather.
