CEDAR CITY, Utah — One of the larger homeless shelters in Cedar City is dealing with damage that is making it harder for them to bring people in from the cold.
“It truly is a really nice shelter to be at,” says James Hudson Gates, who is staying at the Iron County Care and Share shelter. “It's not a permanent solution by any means, and they don't want it to be. It's a hand up, not a handout.”
Gates doesn’t have a home, but he at least has a temporary roof over his head thanks to Care and Share, the largest provider for the hungry and poor in Iron County. Its shelter provides a temporary home for about 400 people a year.
“The goal is to get them in, get that support wrapped around them, and then seeing them, you know, work so hard at putting their lives back together,” said James Jetton, the executive director of Care & Share. “And when they're successful doing that, that's like the best thing, right?”
Jetton, who had a period of homelessness himself in his younger years, said many of those people get back on their feet and come back to volunteer themselves.
He said many they see are without a roof for the first time, whether for their rent becoming unaffordable or from lost employment. Alarmingly, he says one in four of those they’re seeing lately are elderly.
“Many of whom are homeless for the first time in their life,” Jetton said.
Jetton says the goal is for the place to feel more like a big house than a homeless shelter — something Gates said he didn’t experience at another shelter he was at.
“You had to be outside in the weather a lot of the day and stuff like that. It's kind of like a jail with no guards," he said of his former shelter.
But the home that has rooms for men, women and families, has a hole.
Last Tuesday, cold temperatures caused a fire sprinkler pipe to freeze and burst. The ceiling caved in on one family room, and two others were damaged by flooding. Gates said it’s the third time this has happened in three years
“Third time's the charm, right?” Jetton said. “Hopefully this time will be the last time.”
Jetton says the shelter needs to add heaters this time to avoid a repeat. But that’s easier said than done when the shelter just gets by on $750,000 a year, half of which comes through donations.
“We're a smaller nonprofit doing a lot of work with not quite as many resources as we need,” Jetton said. “So a lot of times we put a patch on something or a band-aid on something. But yeah, we can't afford for this to happen again.”
He also says they can’t afford for the rooms to be closed for the months it took to repair them last time.
“It's been really cold here. We've got people out in the community that need safe places to be. We don't have time to stand around and think about things,"
Those looking to help can go to the Iron County Share & Care website.
