By Nicole Lescher
Hospitality House is the only emergency homeless shelter in Nevada County, with 69 beds for homeless men, women and children.
I’m Nicole Lescher and I’m a Case Manager at Hospitality House, setting goals with clients to help them transition from homelessness to housing. One guest I’d like to tell you about today is a woman I’ll call Morticia.
Our team has known Morticia for a while—she’s been homeless for at least five years and has never wanted our help or services, despite our outreach team’s best efforts to connect with her.
Well, part of our philosophy is to never give up on someone. We’re here for wherever they are on their journey, and this week, her journey is finally at Hospitality House! She moved into the shelter this week!
This may not sound too exciting—bringing someone from the streets into our shelter—but it’s a breakthrough when you have someone highly vulnerable like Morticia out there all alone. And now that she’s here, we’re going to wrap our services around her and do everything in our power to ensure she feels supported on her path back to housing. As her new case manager, I hope in the future I’ll be able to give another update on Morticia’s progress.
Homelessness, like in Morticia’s case, is uncomfortable, uncertain, lonely, and at times, very depressing. Our guests have Hospitality House, but many have nothing beyond that. Well, a few brave souls at the shelter decided to participate in a new video we released, which includes their personal stories and perspective of living in our shelter. If anyone has a few minutes to spare, the video is available to watch on our website at hhshelter.org and it’s also on our Facebook page, so give it a watch and share and you’ll see me in the video too.
As we think about shelter life and what it means to be homeless, I’d like to acknowledge a standout volunteer who helps our guests every Thursday night: Bill Blount. Bill makes sure that guests have towels, toiletries, blankets, or anything that is needed to accommodate our guests that night. Bill also has conversations with our guests, creating strong bonds and trust between them. We are grateful for Bill, and if you might have an interest in joining our incredible team of volunteers, we are always looking for more help at our shelter, and at our thrift store, Bread & Roses Thrift and More. Please call our new Volunteer Manager Leah Farkas at 530-615-0805 to get started.
This past week, we were blessed by many caring individuals and I’d like to give a big thank you to Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains, Divine Light Spiritist Center, Unity in the Gold Country Church, Meals by Heels, the Home Team, Seventh-day Adventist Church, and for coming out to cook. To everyone who donated our most needed items last week, thank you as well!
Now down to the nitty gritty needs of the shelter for this week…
- Boxer shorts, M & L
- Men’s jeans, sizes 34 – 36
- Sneakers, sizes 10- 13
- Pajama pants, M & L
- Sunscreen
- Poison oak medicine
- Flip flops
- Blankets
Please drop off urgent items to Utah’s Place, located in Brunswick Basin, past the DMV, at 1262 Sutton Way. For all other donations that may benefit a homeless guest or the shelter in general, please take them to the backdoor of Bread & Roses, our thrift shop, located at 840 E Main Street, directly next door to Sierra Cinemas. Guests at our shelter are given shopping vouchers for the store to buy what they need, so your donation directly helps them. All other items are sold with 100% of the sales supporting the shelter’s operations. Thank you for sticking together so that we all get what we need.