Homeless shelter filling up

Christmas donations are helping the cause

Truro’s homeless shelter is starting to ll up as a cold Christmas beckons.

e Truro Homeless Outreach Society is taking between 16 and 18 clients per night, some of whom must sleep on fold-out cots. So far, however, the shelter is able to accommodate everyone in its upstairs dormitories.

“I feel pretty good,” said Brian Currie, THOS’S operations manager. “It’s bittersweet, as it’s so nice to help people, but at the same time the fact that we are here is disheartening. It would be nice if we weren’t needed at all.”

He said recent freezing weather and snow is making clients “arrive earlier and stay later,” but is not necessarily driving up numbers in new overnight stays.

To help people cope with the cold, THOS has been staying open until 11 a.m. since last month. e shelter is also providing its usual services to clients, from social-skills training to resettling home- less people in apartments.

Of those clients being helped, Currie said about 80 per cent are from Colchester County.

For those who stay the night in Truro, THOS has 16 permanent beds and another 12 cots. If the upstairs section lls up, THOS can unfold more cots on the ground level.

“Every night, we’re just banging on capacity’s door,” said Currie.

However, the public has rallied around THOS in the last few weeks before Christmas. Currie said one man dropped off 10 brand-new parkas, 10 to 15 winter boots and hats and mittens that he bought from Mark’s Warehouse.

Meantime, a steady stream of food donations is allowing THOS’S volunteers to produce 20 to 25 lunches per day for clients seeking help or just something to eat.

“Christmas donations are just huge. We get a lot of dinner stu like canned sandwich meats,” said Currie. “It’s heartwarming, you see the community coming together and doing this for people that they don’t know. is is all brand new stu .”