State funding to keep homeless shelter open
Months away from closing for good, an infusion of state funding will keep The Salvation Army homeless shelter on King Street from closing for good.
State Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-146th Dist., and state Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, R-24th Dist., were on hand at the shelter on April 19 to deliver the traditional oversized check for $225,000.
The funding came about in large part because of a chance encounter in a Harrisburg hallway in 2023. Dan Muroff, who works as a consultant for The Salvation Army saw Ciresi and told him in passing that the Pottstown shelter was going to close. “Is this serious?” Ciresi replied.
Muroff said he was informing Ciresi as a courtesy and they were not asking for money, even though money was the problem. “You’re not closing,” Ciresi replied.
“I called up Tracy and I said ‘we have to get them some funding, we can’t let them close, we cannot abandon those people,’” Ciresi recalled Friday as he stood with Pennycuick and three Salvation Army officials holding the big check. Pennycuick agreed and they began looking for money. “This would have been a major loss for us,” she said.
What they ultimately came up with was $125,000 from the Senate and $100,000 from the House, all combined through a program of the Community and Economic Assistance fund of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.
The money will go toward overdue infrastructure improvements and, along with some financial restructuring, will help the shelter stay open into the foreseeable future, said the Rev. Bonnie Camarda, director of partnerships for The Salvation Army of Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware. “We’re here to stay,” she said.
“We contacted Montgomery County and tried the get them to go in with us, a third, a third, a third, but we never heard back from them,”
Ciresi said, expressing his disappointment by saying “this is a 62-municipality problem in Montgomery County, not just a Pottstown problem.”.
Montgomery County Commissioner Thomas DiBello, who was not in office when the funding request was made to the county, and who has made helping with the homeless situation in Montgomery County a focus of his first term, was flabbergasted.
“This is one of the biggest shelters in the county, how can keeping this open not have been a priority?” he asked.
Emergency Housing Director Wendy Egolf said in fact it is the largest shelter in Montgomery County that takes families to help keep them together. Opened in 1989, the shelter has 11 rooms and 44 beds.
Prior to stopping by to deliver the check and take a tour, Pennycuick, Ciresi and DiBello took a tour of one of the homeless camps in Pottstown. “You can tell by some of the set-ups that some of these people are really skilled at living outside, which means they have been living outside for too long,” Pennycuick said.
“Our top priority is getting families off the street,” said Egolf. The shelter, she said, also provides “wrap around services — things like Pottstown Works which helps clients with rudimentary job skills, lesson on how to prepare for a job interview, help with getting work clothes. “It’s modeled after Cincinnati Works,” she said.
The shelter also relies on a dedicated corps of volunteers, particularly with the meals it serves, which helps keep costs low, Egolf said.
The shelter uses the county office called “Your Way Home” to screen and prioritize clients. “When we have a vacancy, we call themupand ask who is next on the list.”
The county also provides funding, nearly all of which is what Di
Bello called “pass through money” because it actually comes from the federal government to the county, which distributes it.
And in recent years, despite a greater need, the amount of thatmoney, which is at the county’s discretion to prioritize, has hardly increased. When Leanne T. Robert, divisional social services ministries director asked why, she was told “that’s what its always been.” But as costs and clients increase, keeping the funding static amounts to a cut, she said.
“The money from the county is not keeping up with inflation,” DiBello said, “so the reimbursements are not keeping up with the actual costs.”
“There’s never enough money, which is why we’ve always operated at a little bit of a deficit,” said Camarda.
Egolf noted that “this year, the country did find some extra money for the shelter.”
Since he has taken office, DiBello said he has spent his first four months on a kind of listening tour, hearing about concerns and trying to understand how the county offices function.
“I have seen somewhat seem to me like redundancies, so I’ll be looking closely at the budget to see if there aren’t some ways we can make sure to provide for everyone effectively, to make sure there is follow-through and that we’re all pulling in the same direction,” DiBello said.