Times are changing.
It's a mantra the Salvation Army Center of Hope knows all too well.
When the Salvation Army built its facility 23 years ago at 927 Jefferson St., it was intended to serve primarily single men.
But in the ensuing years, the Salvation Army found it was providing shelter for more women.
And in recent years, it has sheltered more families.
The need
The center is divided into two wings -- one serving men and the other serving women. But, the women's wing also contains two rooms available for families, director Brian Vogeler said.
Proposed changes, Vogeler said, would separate children (who are parts of family groups) from shelter sections that include single adults.
Salvation Army Maj. Curtiss Hartley said the rooms the Salvation Army has assigned to provide beds for families don't meet the unique situations families have.
"For instance," Hartley said, "if it was a mom and a dad and two girls, sharing the communal bathroom, it is not real comfortable for a lot of parents, for the children themselves. It's not ideal."
And it can be "awkward" for a single father coming in, who may have to share a communal bathroom with single women staying in the shelter.
"All of these different dynamics going on make it really ideal for us to consider setting up a specific family section," Hartley said.
In that near quarter-century, the center has been "used hard," Vogeler said. The center has provided thousands of "bed nights" for clients and served more than 800,000 meals.
From April 2021 through March 2022, it provided 8,069 "bed nights," the number of nights clients were assigned to beds. That does not include the shelter's "cots" programs. The cots program started as a way of providing an additional warm place to sleep for people when beds were full and nights became too cold or too hot for safety out in the elements.
However, last summer, the Salvation Army announced it would offer cots every night indefinitely because of the large volume of people who faced evictions.
During March when weather was unusually mild, the shelter still saw 289 people stay on the cots (about eight people per night).
There is demonstrated need for more beds, they said.
The pitch
The pandemic put strains on social services across the nation. As it did, the federal government created the American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) and distributed trillions of dollars to help communities recover.
Feds directed that Cole County would receive about $15 million, and Jefferson City would receive about $8 million, in direct relief.
The funds offer an opportunity for agencies to make a difference for people facing poverty, Hartley said.
Local Salvation Army leadership created a "conceptual proposal" with which they hope to explain the needs the Salvation Army faces, Hartley said.
He recently presented that conceptual proposal to the county and the city. Hartley asked the two entities each dip into their ARPA pools and earmark half of the funding needed for changes to the center, which are estimated to cost about $3.5 million.
The Salvation Army has worked on plans for the center for several years, but they went on hold during the pandemic. A little more than a year ago, it dusted the plans off. Plans show the center could gain the space it needs by moving some social services into the basement.
All of the social services work that's taking place in the Center of Hope is to relocate downstairs. So, social service clients will drive down the hill to reach those offices.
And the dining room would naturally separate the "new" family wing from the adult wings.
"Shelter clients will come up here," Hartley said. "One of the positives of that is it separates the populations, which helps with privacy, confidentiality and safety. So, there are a lot of positives to that."
The move gives social services its own space. Its existing space that is now a lobby, pantry and row of offices will move into the basement.
The area they exit is to convert to four family "units," which would share a lobby. And each would have its own bathroom and tiny kitchenette.
The challenge
Cole County has received more than $30 million in preliminary requests for ARPA funding, according to Presiding Cole County Commissioner Sam Bushman. Those requests don't include the Center of Hope's, which will likely arrive Monday, he said.
"The majority of (requests) are really good causes," Bushman said. "Our advisory committee is going to meet and go through the requests that we've received so far and prioritize those."
He cautions it will take some time to make decisions and distribute money.
"I hope that maybe there are other state and federal monies out there that they can access," Bushman said. "We're kind of in the beginning stages. If (Cole County and Jefferson City) each give $500,000, then they have $1 million. It's not much, but it's still $1 million."
There are many needs the city could address with ARPA money it is disbursing, Mayor Carrie Tergin said. However, a lot of questions remain. City Council will be discussing requests further, she said. It will decide if any of those groups in general will receive allocations.
"(The Salvation Army proposal) doesn't go into specifics, but it does go into some detail about what we want to do with the existing building and why," Hartley said. "At this point, we've made the presentation to both the county and the city, who both have their own pots of this ARPA money. From our standpoint, the ideal would be if they both work together and we get half and half from the two of them. And, they provide the funding for us."
If the Salvation Army receives all the funding it has asked for, it would use much of the money to upgrade essentially, all of the infrastructure of this building -- the electrical, the plumbing, the insulation, fire suppression, security systems, and other systems.
Some need a lot of beefing up, he said. Some systems may not exist yet.
In recent years, the United Way has provided grants to help overcome some of the building's issues.
"The building is really old and suffering from use," Hartley said. "The bathrooms were one of the worst (issues). So, we attacked that first, and they're getting much better. The kitchen is getting some upgrade as well."
The organization would use a significant portion of the money to upgrade the entire facility.
The rest of the money would be for a renovation -- which would include knocking out all the internal spaces in the social services section of the building and creating four family -- almost hotel-style -- rooms.
They would be separate from the rest of the shelter, and would have their own entrance into the dining room.
"Families would have their own space. All the singles on the other side would have their own space," Hartley said.
As the shelter is now, it has 31 beds, 14 of which are set aside for women and 17 for men. However, when families take up the two spaces on the women's side of the shelter, the number of available beds may suddenly drop from 14 to 10. If two families need shelter, the number of available women's beds drops to six, according to Salvation Army Capt. Justin Windell.
The reality
The county understands the Salvation Army's needs have changed during the past 20 years, Bushman said. However, there are other organizations with needs. He said there are concerns about the Cole County Juvenile Division Prenger Center, its county's juvenile detention center.
"It's always full. It was built in the '90s," Bushman said. "It was built with a lot of donated products and volunteers. So, it wasn't necessarily the best product. It's been used very hard too."
Something that is certain, he added, is "the number of juveniles we hold is not going to go down."
The number of people who require shelter at the center also isn't likely to fall, Windell said.
For the past few months, it has seen a steady stream of clients who have undergone evictions.
"For a lot of people, landlords are finally saying enough's enough," Windell said. "It always seems to be around the last of the month or the middle of the month."
Evictions appear to coincide with eviction court dates, Vogeler said. At the beginning of April, he said, the shelter took in six people who had been evicted.
There were six on the first day of March, he said. Three were elderly.
"They are really difficult to house because of health conditions -- walkers, diapers -- we've never experienced that as much as we have here lately," Vogeler said. "Daily living activities -- feeding yourself, cleaning yourself -- if someone can't complete their daily living activities, we can't house them here. If they have an accident, we can't change them."
The shelter has to reach out to Missouri Senior and Disability Services as soon as possible. It has to move them out as soon as possible.
One of the services the shelter provides is assistance with permanent housing. Clients are limited in how long they may stay at the shelter.
"Typically, we get people housed at the first of the month," Vogeler said. "Toward the end of the month, we get a big turnover, with people moving into their facilities or houses. (Then,) on the first, we get all these calls, 'I've been evicted and need a place to go.'"
It's a repeating cycle. Staff understand that at the end of the month, they will again get some people housed and out of the shelter. And then, others will be calling.
It is a delicate situation, Hartley said. The Salvation Army made the decision to take people in (on cots year-round) for us to make the decision -- and it was because of the populations that are showing up.
Of course, the Salvation Army is concerned about more people showing up simply because cots are available.
"We don't want it to become a secondary shelter program. We really do want it to continue to be an emergency-type basis," Hartley said.
"We don't want to seem unfriendly and unwelcoming, but we do want to stress that this isn't for long-term -- for somebody who just wants a place to crash and will continue doing that month after month after month.
"It's a careful balance for us to figure out how to set policy for that."
The Salvation Army looks at the eviction situation with a disaster mindset, as opposed to a daily mindset, Windell said.
Something the organization recognizes, Windell said, is people may get evicted. And, their family may live in the next town over or the next state over.
"They just need a place to stay for three nights, until mom and dad can come and pick them up. Or they can move in with their cousin," he said. "It would not work for us to get them into a 90-day program, and meet with a case manager and do all the paperwork for that, and to get them into a housing program, when they just need the three nights.
"It is definitely a short-term thing."
A young man called last week crying because his landlord evicted him, Windell said. He didn't know where to go. He had contact with his parents, and ended up moving in with his parents. He simply needed a place to go that night, because he was homeless for the first time and didn't know what to do.
"That's one of the issues that Salvation Army has always dealt with," Hartley said. "You've got those who know the systems and know where to get help, and how to get help.
"But you always have -- and the tornado was an example, and COVID itself and evictions -- where more and more people who have never been in the system and don't know how to get help show up at our door or make a phone call."