By Carly Plemons
The Torres Community Shelter is a place where more than 100 people a night go to get help they can't find anywhere else.
Three factors that lead to this situation:
• First, the shelter has been reliant on holiday surplus funds and this year, it was extremely short compared to previous years.
• Second, the number of people utilizing the shelter has increased significantly. Last year its served an average of 80-90 people per night; and in the past four months, there have been over 100 per night. Keep in mind the fact that it costs the shelter $25 a day per person.
• The third factor is a federal grant, Emergency Solutions Grants Program. The grant application submission date has been pushed back six months to later date, making it so the funding is unavailable for the shelter in the meantime. Torres Community shelter can't apply as of right now due to the application not becoming available until May. Once the application is submitted, funds won’t be allocated until 2017.
In addition to these factors, there's another underlying issue: the Torres Community Shelter relies on a holiday surplus donations during the holiday months and the grant funding for the core services the shelter provides.
"We need to change that dynamic" Montgomery said. “We need to get to a point where we are stable month-in, month-out now that we’ve got enough income to protect our core services -- food, shelter and case management.”
If the shelter is going to close, how is it open now? In order to conserve funds, the shelter laid off the development and service coordinators, and one of three case managers. Right now, their monthly expenses after the cuts are about $30,000 when they were around $70,000. Still, it costs the shelter about $1,500 to run the organization each day.
"To a certain extent, if we just get a huge kind of mountain of money right now and we don't get more folks that are helping monthly, then it’s only a matter of time before we spend down that mountain and we find ourselves in the same situation," Montgomery said.
The community has been supportive in bringing the shelter funds in order to buy time, but it is estimated that the shelter only has around a year of building and recovery before its doors will be closed for good.
"I think the community understands what a value that we are, but that's why it was important for us to come forward. It would be pretty devastating if not only the current 100 sum guest that were here were all put out in the street, but the 700 people or so that we are going to serve in the next year, the hundreds of that we're going to help out of homelessness." - Brad Montgomery, Executive Director
If people are going to be left on the street it will cost our community on average of anywhere between $25,000 and $35,000 dollars per person a year according to the shelter's executive director.
“Our partners, they would do their absolute best to try to cover the gap,” Montgomery said. “All of them combined wouldn't be able to fill the hole created by this closing.”
He told the Chico City Council that a fundraising campaign could solve the money problem, stating that 3000 people helping with $10 per month would put them in a position where they'd never need to rely on government funding again to provide basic services.
City Council donated around $277 raised from the red-top meters downtown to the Torres Community Shelter during their time of need.
"I think the community understands what a value that we are, but that's why it was important for us to come forward," Montgomery said. “It would be pretty devastating if not only the current 100-some guests that were here were all put out in the street, but the 700 people or so that we are going to serve in the next year, the hundreds of that we’re going to help out of homelessness...it would be for humanitarian reasons a horrible thing. ”
"I know that a awful lot of time college students would be a strapped for cash, but I also know that when things are important to anybody they find a way to do it." - Brad Montgomery
