By: John Domen
The Prince George’s County Council signed off on a $5 million investment Tuesday in a new homeless shelter for the Warm Nights program, which has offered food and shelter to homeless residents around the Maryland county for years.
The money is coming from the American Rescue Plan, and that’s because the pandemic is changing the way nonprofits think about homeless shelters going forward, Warm Nights included.
“Warm Nights was generally 50 people in a big room, in a church basement on a cot, 6 inches from the next person,” said Tim Jansen, the executive director of Community Crisis Services, which has run the Warm Nights program in the county for more than a decade.
What the pandemic revealed was that “dormitory style situations, where you had 20 folks in a big dorm just breed things like COVID,” he said.
What was also discovered was that when homeless residents were put in motel rooms, it had a noticeable positive impact.
“There’s this amazing freedom, and this amazing strength that you see in a person when they have control over a bathroom door and control over a door between them and the rest of the world, even though it’s not technically their spot,” Jansen said.
That’s the kind of facility Jansen said they’ll be looking to acquire, now that the funding has been passed. Exactly where it will go isn’t clear yet. Read more at WTOP.
