Families facing homelessness now have another housing option as a 30-bed, 12-family homeless shelter opened up on West Independence Way on the University of Rhode Island’s campus.
Run by the Westerly Area Rest Meals Center out of Westerly, Rhode Island, the new shelter is owned by Rhode Island’s Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals.
The WARM Center was founded in 1987, according to their website. Their mission was to provide shelter and meals to the homeless population of southern Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut.
There is a lack of resources for family emergency shelters in Rhode Island, said executive director of the WARM Center, Russ Partridge. Over the past year, the Rhode Island Office of Housing and Community Development has searched for possible buildings to house the new shelter.
The Department of Behavioral Health identified a building it owned, on property owned by the University. The team at the WARM Center believed that the building would be a good fit, and wrote a grant to the Department of Housing to begin operating the family shelter out of it, Partridge said.
There are not enough family shelters in Washington County, leaving both families and individuals with nowhere to go due to the lack of options available, Partridge said.
“It’s not that they weren’t funded or anything like that,” Partridge said. “It’s that they did not exist.”
Before opening the new shelter, the families would be put into motels – a cost ineffective and unsustainable option, he said.
Currently in Rhode Island, 16 out of every 10,000 residents are facing homelessness according to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. The building comes at a time of need, as Partridge said that there has been an increase in the homeless population since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I have been doing this work for about 30 years, and I have never seen or experienced this level of need ever,” Partridge said.
To provide for the families, the shelter has 24-hour staff, as well as a kitchen for both families and volunteer chefs to cook in. Each family that enters the shelter would be given a case manager to help them find more permanent housing options, and if needed, employment.
The shelter has already begun its outreach, currently housing seven families who, up until last week, were homeless.
“They were living in their cars, or living in places not meant for human habitation,” Partridge said.
The previous view of homelessness no longer applies to the modern day, he said. Parents wake up, drop their kids off at childcare or school, go work for eight hours and then go back to the shelter. Most of the families had homes prior, and were since forced out because of the tight rental market and landlords seeing potential to get higher rent payments.
However, the shelter has received some backlash, specifically from parents who say that the homeless shelter will alter the college experience for their children.
“A lot of the homeless are chemical dependent and/or acute mental health untreated,” said user Paul John on a parents Facebook page.
The goal of the WARM Center’s team is to work to end the stigma around homelessness, Partridge said.
“The person at the coffee shop register, the person at the convenience store, some even students,” Partridge said. “These are the people we are talking about, it is the working poor.”
The shelter remains a safe space for families facing homelessness and hopes to create a welcoming environment for a conversation about the homeless, he said.
Currently, the WARM Center offers many programs designed to provide relief to homeless people. These programs include support homes, emergency shelters, a kitchen serving nearly 100 meals everyday and more. They also offer an “Attire for Hire” program designed to provide work and interview appropriate clothing to those who can not afford it.
Visit warmcenter.org for more information about the new shelter, or for information about their other programs.