As reported on KVMR on Dec. 14:
Hospitality House is the only emergency homeless shelter in Nevada County, with 69 beds for homeless men, women and children.
I’m Fred Skeen and I’m a case manager at Hospitality House, helping individuals in our shelter with their next steps to move from homelessness to housing. One person I’m currently working with that’d I like to share with you today is a lady I’ll call Leah. Leah is someone highly educated who in the past has worked with top executives in the Bay Area. She’s really someone who had it all and then in the blink of an eye, it was gone. You see, Leah was struggling with alcoholism and some of the choices she made influenced her livelihood. In the end, Leah hit rock bottom. She got a DUI, lost her car and became homeless, but there is a silver lining to all of this. She realized she needed help. She turned to our friends at CoRR—Community Recovery Resources—where she underwent treatment for her alcoholism. She successfully completed their program and moved to our shelter where I’m helping her with her next steps. I work with a lot of people and I can tell you with certainty, Leah is a dreamer. She has big ideas and she’s ready to take back control of her life and climb back up the ladder. This week Leah has been proactively applying for jobs, getting health insurance, and we’ve even discussed her future business goals, such as one day operating a bed and breakfast. On top of this and most importantly, Leah maintains her sobriety and this week we’re celebrating 3 months sober!
As we get closer to Christmas, we’d like to remind our community that our thrift shop, Bread & Roses, is fully stocked with all your holiday shopping needs. If you’re buying gifts for any bookworms, you can get 10 BOOKS for 1 dollar…It’s the best deal around and it’s only available at Bread & Roses, open Monday – Saturday from 12 to 6 p.m.
I’d also like to take a moment to thank the many organizations who came and fed our hungry guests this week. We’ve had Twin Cities Church, Trinity Episcopal Church, Veritas Church who cooked for us twice, Grass Valley Charter, Tailan’s Group, and Alta Sierra Latter-Day Saints who cook tonight. From all of us at Hospitality House, we thank you!
When we think about feeding our guests, it’s a lot of work. We have 69 mouths to feed, three times a day and right now, we’d like to ask you—the community—to help us provide the 44,000 meals needed in 2019. We have a generous donor right now who is willing to match our donations through tomorrow, December 15, and with your help, we’ll keep our homeless friends fed. One dollar provides one meal but donate today and one meal becomes two. See hhshelter.org to donate. And if you can’t donate financially, you can always donate your time. We are always looking for volunteers and there are a variety of positions, from cooking, to admin, to monitoring our shelter and more. Please see our website for details. And while you’re there, we invite you to take our housing survey so we can better understand our community’s perspective on homelessness and housing. It takes one minute to complete and your insights are invaluable. Visit hhshelter.org to take it right now.
To everyone who dropped off needed items last week—we thank you! Now down to the nitty gritty needs of the shelter for this week…
- Men’s jeans – sizes 28, 34, 36
- Men’s sweatpants – all sizes
- Men’s long johns – sizes M, L, XL
- Men’s medium depends
- Men’s XL t-shirts and sweaters
- Men’s boots – sizes 8-12
- Men’s and women’s gloves
- Women’s under britches – sizes 5 – 8
- Women’s long johns – sizes M, L, XL
- Women’s winter boots – sizes 7-11
- Deodorant
Drop off your donations at Utah’s Place, located in Brunswick Basin, past the DMV, at 1262 Sutton Way. Thank you for sticking together so that we all get what we need.