Notes from my Knapsack 1-26-23

Notes from my Knapsack 1-26-23
Jeff Gill

Five years, progress still needed
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Five years ago as January was nearing its end, something new was heading our way.

A "polar vortex" was forecast to rumble across central Ohio, with lows in the negative two digits. I'd been involved in housing and homelessness responses in Licking County since 1992, and knew from recent work in the community we had at minimum dozens of unsheltered homeless, people who for a variety of reasons were outside of the hatful of emergency shelters we had and blessedly do have in our area.

Whatever the reason, the expected ten below and half a foot of snow was going to put unbearable stress on the lives of people living without shelter, so I did some checking around, by phone and email, for what our emergency response plan was. To boil down a slew of communications, the replies came down to "yeah, we need to think about that, too; maybe next year."

So I called a few leaders of the church I served in 2018, and another person seeing the same grim prospects heading our way did the same. Over the next three nights, a motley array of volunteers and donated materials came into two church basements that opened hearts and doors to sheltering people who had nowhere else to go.

I'll be blunt: when people ask me if it worked, my reply was "no one died." That's really what was at stake. It got to minus thirteen at my location, and not my tongue but my fingertips did, in fact, stick to the metal of the church sign as I was putting up a notice that we were open. I went inside to warm up before I did the other side. It was dangerously cold. We were not trying to save souls or herd people into recovery or even urge folks to sign up for housing programs, though information was made available, and a few individuals asked to pray upstairs.

But we did this simply to ensure that, unlike some other places around Ohio and the Midwest, we didn't let death end a person's story. I heard those nights myriad reasons why people were homeless; some stories made sense and put a chill down my back in a warm basement, and others didn't quite add up, but I heard them out, offered what support and guidance we could. Most of them had a plan, some realistic, others less so, but they all had a dream of not living like this, sooner or later. The point of the warming shelter was to give them a chance to work out those dreams in practical terms, in due time.

That's still why we do it. Later on in 2019 we were blessed with the support of the Licking County Foundation to put together a Warming Center Task Force. It's still volunteers and church basements and bits and pieces of a plan. We set a guideline of opening up if it got colder than 10 degrees overnight, bumped it up to 15 degree overnight lows, and this past year pushed it back to 10 degrees simply because we are NOT trying to stay open all winter.

The emergency warming centers are not a solution for anything, honestly. They exist, when the steering committee decides to open, to save lives. You could make a case for being open whenever it's below freezing at night, but that's a different program and frankly it can't work on an all volunteer basis. Thank you to the many of you reading this who have helped out, in large ways and small.

The work continues, the solutions imperfect, but where there is life, there is hope.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been cold, but not that cold. Tell him how you keep your heart warm at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.