The outdoor temperature is 25 degrees and it is snowing steadily, adding a fresh coat of white on top of the inches of snow that have already accumulated on the ground in the last week. I am tucked inside my home, cozy with the thermostat cranked up to a balmy 72 degrees, and sipping a steaming cup of coffee as I write.

We’re just past Christmas and not quite to the New Year yet, but the bustle of the holidays is winding down and it is a time to reflect on the year. At Tedford Housing, we were blessed again in 2021 with generous support for our work with people experiencing or at risk of homelessness from donors, volunteers, and community leaders. As we trudged together through a second pandemic year, they stepped up to help us ensure that we were able to serve as many of our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness as possible and to help prevent others from becoming homeless.

The pandemic has had an unparalleled impact on the need for emergency housing and amplified the existing crisis of homelessness across the State. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, however, our dedicated case managers have continued to connect both our shelter guests and our outreach clients to permanent housing and the supportive services that will ensure they are successful in maintaining stable housing.

Last year, Tedford served 38 individuals in our adult emergency housing shelter and 15 families, comprised of 48 family members, in the family shelter. With our capacity still limited due to the pandemic, our turn-away data remained similar to past years. We were forced to tell 284 adults and 74 families that we didn’t have a place for them at the shelters.

Far too many residents of our community don’t have simple comforts this time of year — a refuge from the cold and a hot drink to warm them on a chilly day. Instead, they find themselves seeking brief bouts of warmth from within the confines of public spaces like the library during the day and trudging back out into the mean Maine winter air just as the temperatures begin to plummet at night. They are sleeping in their frost-covered cars, sharing an unheated storage unit as a shelter, huddling under a cardboard box behind a dumpster, or staying with the spouse who abuses them because they have nowhere else to go.

The myopic approach to addressing homelessness taken by some in our communities — turning a blind eye, shooing “those people” away from public spaces and places of business, or sending unsheltered people off to the next town to deal with them — does nothing to address the human services, public health, or economic crisis that is homelessness.

Investing in emergency housing is an investment in the physical and economic health of our communities. It will return dividends by creating housing stability that will have a significant and lasting impact for some of the most vulnerable and often disenfranchised people and strengthen the core of our community.

Slightly more than two years ago, a man walked out into the darkness along the railroad track that runs through the Town of Brunswick. He spread out his sleeping bag, crawled inside, and was never seen alive again. He was found dead inside his sleeping bag on Nov. 23, weeks after he was first reported missing.

His name was Russell Williams.

It’s unacceptable that anyone should ever die alone in a sleeping bag in the middle of winter in our community. It’s even more appalling than more than two years later, many have forgotten about Russell. And many of us are still fighting the stigma of homelessness to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Tedford Housing needs you to help us change that. We are nearing the end of an almost decade-long battle to build a new emergency housing building in Brunswick to serve those residents of our community who are experiencing homelessness. Our plans call for a single, secure building with 64 beds, 40 to serve families and 24 for individual adults, and space for all of our staff to be under one roof where we can more rapidly address the needs of our clients.

We need you to help us finally make our dream of a new emergency housing to serve the community a reality. With the date tentatively set for Jan. 11 at 7 p.m., the town of Brunswick’s Planning Board will hold a public hearing on our application to replace Tedford Housing’s existing aging downtown facilities with a new building on Thomas Point Road.

If you believe that everyone has a right to safe emergency housing, we implore you to speak up now. The public is invited to testify in person at Town Hall, online, or to submit written testimony. Please reach out to me at (207) 729-1161, ext. 102 or email rota@tedfordhousing.org. I’d love to chat about our plans.

On behalf of our Tedford Housing family, I wish you and yours all the best in 2022.

Rota Knott is the executive director of Tedford Housing. Giving Voice is a weekly collaboration among four local non-profit service agencies to share information and stories about their work in the community. 

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