Facility for homeless women to close; nonprofit lacks funds
Two Orlando-area charities that house the homeless are faced with closing at least part of their operations, and one may be forced to put people back on the street, officials announced this week.
The Women’s Residential and Counseling Center — one of Central Florida’s few shelters for homeless women and their children — will shutter its Orlando facility and sell the prime downtown property, assessed at over $3 million. But executives said all 52 residents would be relocated, either to private apartments or to the main campus of the Coalition for the Homeless, which owns the WRCC.
“That’s our goal over the next 90 days or so,” said John Hearn, the coalition’s president and CEO. “But it’s not a hard deadline, and nobody will be put out on the streets.”
Another nonprofit, Matthew’s Hope Ministries
in Winter Garden, is facing financial struggles that may force it to close some of its 15 transitional homes, where formerly homeless residents stay while they attend school or work toward financial independence.
“I can’t imagine going to those folks and saying, ‘You can’t stay here anymore,’ ” said Matthew’s Hope founder and CEO Scott Billue. “But if we don’t raise some money very, very soon, that’s what is going to happen. We’re two to four weeks from beginning to shut down.”
Initially, that would impact perhaps a dozen people, but the opportunity to house people is critical to the ministry, Billue said. Matthew’s Hope historically provides anyone who needs it a meal and a shower, but it reserves more extensive aid — from bicycles to dentures and housing — for those willing to work or go to school.
“Our operation collapses without our homes,” he said.
Billue blamed the troubles on a 25 percent jump in demand for services in recent weeks and a lack of reserve funds. The nonprofit had to spend $40,000 last year to move its 7-year-old operation across town, and it skipped its largest fundraising event while it relocated.
Operational costs — for the 15 houses, a pantry for groceries and supplies, a health clinic, a preschool and case workers — run about $55,000 a month, Billue said, all of which comes from private donors. That’s about $10,000 more than the agency is currently bringing in.
Sherry Easley, 49, who has three children, including a disabled 21-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, is praying donors will cover the gap. Without the housing that Matthew’s Hope provides, she said she and her children will be living in her car or in the woods. After her 27-year marriage ended abruptly last year, she could no longer make ends meet. The nonprofit took her in and taught her to restore furniture.
Three weeks ago, she landed a full-time job in the paint department of Lowe’s.
“I just need more time to save money for a place of my own,” she said. “God has had his hand on me, but I still have a long journey ahead.”
While local homeless agencies often see a surge in demand during the summer — when children can no longer get free meals at school and hot, rainy weather makes living outdoors especially miserable — Billue said part of the pressure for Matthew’s Hope comes from its location. Winter Garden has become a hot spot for development, and every acre of woods cleared for a subdivision displaces people seeking shelter in tents among the trees.
“Pretty much anytime they bulldoze a new section, we see more homeless people,” said Martha Are, executive director of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida.
The Women’s Residential and Counseling Center — on 1.4 acres at the corner of Magnolia Avenue and East Colonial Drive in downtown Orlando — has had very different troubles. Late last year, mold problems forced the closure of one of its three buildings, and the number of women and children it could house dropped from about 130 to 55.
Because government funding for transitional programs has been cut in recent years, the coalition decided to study whether the cost of repairing the facility would be money well spent.
“We stopped counting when the estimates went north of $1 million,” Hearn said. “A separate facility is just not an economically viable option.”
Instead, the women who live there — many of them survivors of domestic violence — may be eligible for apartments under a separate government program, Hearn said.
Are, who helps manage that program, called rapid re-housing, said she couldn’t say immediately how many of the women and children her agency will be able to provide with apartments.
Shelley Lauten, CEO of the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness, said the coalition is making the financially responsible decision and that she trusts the coalition will care for the WRCC residents.
But she is concerned that there are dwindling options for homeless housing.
“Every day I worry,” she said. “We don’t have sufficient housing as it is. Now, we’re starting to address that problem, but it won’t be fixed overnight.”