Our neighborhood association has been asked to lend our support to the creation of a new 40-bed winter shelter at the corner of 14th and MLK that will be open from December 1, 2014 – March 1, 2015. We intend to poll our  membership in the next week or two to determine if we should support this endeavor or not. In the meantime we want people to be informed on this new initiative to address the homeless situation downtown.

Please read the following message from the leader of St. Louis Winter Outreach, Teka Childress, for more info about the shelter.

Click/press here to ask her further questions on the project.

The St. Louis Winter Outreach Group is asking your support to open a 40-bed winter shelter at 14th and MLK from December 1, 2014 – March 1, 2015.

Here are some pertinent facts re: our plan and we invite you to contact Teka Childress with any concerns or questions:

St. Louis Winter Outreach has been in operation for nine years and has sponsored eight winter shelters at the following locations: Christ Church Cathedral, St. Francis Xavier College Church, Americorps St. Louis, Metropolitan Community Church, The Society of Friends, Sts. Theresa and Bridget Catholic Church, Calvary Missionary Baptist Church, and Winco Window Company. We have many other partners who work with us and hundreds of volunteers.

We will be signing a one year sublease with an option for renting a second year. We want to make this a good thing for everyone concerned and are happy to find ways to make it work. If we don’t do it right, it will be easy for you to keep us from continuing at this site and we will need your support for anything more permanent.

We plan to have a relatively set group of guests who will receive shelter all winter at this site and hope to house folks whose lives are more stable here. We will use our other night-by-night overflow shelters for some of the folks with greater struggles. The guests housed will predominately be people who are already downtown with nowhere to sleep, who would otherwise be outside on the streets of downtown.

We are planning for the shelter to be open from 7pm to 7am and will not allow people to stay around when the building is closed.

We expect to have anywhere from 5 or so people working at the shelter with the forty guests on any given night, and we are expecting to hire someone to be there as a consistent presence.

We plan to share resources with those in the shelter and indeed hope to launch a program to house some people more permanently. We will be working with several organizations to do this.

We not only seek your support but would love to have your participation at the shelter.

If you have any hesitations we ask you to let us know and also to give us a chance to show you that our goal is to enhance the lives of us all.

Thank you,

Teka Childress