Restwell Center Seed Money Fund
Donation protected
A Cheap Place to Shower and Sleep
Grants Pass now has a place for intoxicated people to sleep off their intoxication, the Sobering Center, thanks to Chief Landis and company. Hearts with a Mission is starting a juvenile shelter here like they have in Medford. We already have the Gospel Rescue Mission and its residential rehab, and Faith House, a shelter for battered women and their children. The Salvation Army soup kitchen is another long-established feature in Grants Pass, and a few churches offer free meals, showers and clothing as well.
Now we need a cheap place to shower and sleep, a hostel, for people who are not intoxicated, not juvenile, not seeking help for addictions, not battered, or for whom there is no room in other shelters. It’s time to start a non-profit to build and run a large hostel so people who are willing to be quiet and behave well can pay $5 to $10 to shower and spend the night, no searches, no applications, no questions asked. It can be a soft place to land for those who find themselves on our street without shelter for any reason, and even for some thrifty travelers.
We call it the Restwell Center. We are the Friends of the Restwell Center. We want to build a super-hostel, a big room full of cots, dimly lit and watched over by a guardian and cameras; also showers; lockers; a reading room with information on local services; dog kennels, and a classroom.
We are currently looking at the closed Ray’s grocery store on north 7th Street, which has been for sale for a while, as the perfect building and property in the best location for our purpose. It has a fairly large, open building with proper plumbing and a parking lot with a lot of landscaping space that is a maintenance liability for most any other business. But that gardening space is an asset for us, because we also want to offer paid on-the-job training for gardeners and janitors, and use it to grow fruits, flowers, greens and herbs that people can pick and eat. Besides paid job training, the Restwell Center will offer 11 full-time jobs and 10 part-time.
A year or so ago, an apartment building in Grants Pass was bought by a non-profit agency to create housing for drug addicts. The tenants were told that they had to find another place to live, in a city with a very tight rental market. They were given enough time for most of them to find a place; not all managed to. It is still empty.
Landlords have been evicting tenants on 30 days notice; remodeling; and charging higher rents to new tenants. Cheap, problematic motels have been shut down, pushing their tenants onto other motels or the street. People are always getting kicked out of homes or have to leave. This year’s homeless count revealed that we have over 1,000 people without homes in Josephine County, up from 700-800 at the beginning of the recession.
Compared to the need, available shelters are relatively small: the largest one, the Gospel Rescue Mission, can house up to 36 men and a larger number of women with their children. Its mission is to rehabilitate addicts through prayer, church attendance, volunteer work and quitting drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Most can stay only 30 days. They just stopped offering showers and meals to non-residents.
The new juvenile shelter will house 18 youths. And with the Sobering Center now open, we don’t want people getting drunk and disorderly this winter just to sleep out of the cold for a night. To use the Restwell Center, one will have to be relatively sober and orderly or end up in the Sobering Center.
Many people are camping in the weeds, bushes, alleys or abandoned houses, learning the ways of vagrants who scatter litter and look for mature weeds and old litter that shows no one is paying attention to a place.
Such places are dangerous as well as dirty, wet, cold and hot and not good for anyone’s mood or mind, driving people to drugs and alcohol, keeping them unable to find a job because they are not clean or well-rested. We have laws against camping on other people’s property or public property, but they cannot be properly enforced without a legal alternative.
The Center will be sustainably funded by bed rentals in times like these, when the demand is great. Cot vouchers will be sold to anyone who wants to buy them, to give to beggars instead of cash. Fundraisers will be needed only when times are so good that demand is down, the opposite of most other charities.
There are many people in need of shelter who have income, just not enough to rent an apartment. Some have jobs; some have Social Security or General Assistance. Using this Center can help them keep a job or find one while saving up for a place, or simply keep a roof over their heads and stay clean and dry indefinitely.
The need for your assistance is great and urgent. Part of the urgency is that the old Rays property could be sold before we can buy it, which would force us to buy and build in another location not as good. We need a leader for this project,one who has connections and can ask the right people to be on our board. We need a bookkeeper, volunteer now, paid once we have the money. And we need at least $1000 more to start our non-profit and be able to apply for grants.
I recently stepped down from leading this project because I am not qualified, not having the connections, credibility, or the leadership skills. I am a natural gardener, gardening teacher, writer and researcher. I can research and write grants; later I can garden and teach.
If you want to be part of this project, please join Friends of the Restwell Center on Facebook; and/or donate at GoFundMe.com/ Restwell Center right away.
Grants Pass now has a place for intoxicated people to sleep off their intoxication, the Sobering Center, thanks to Chief Landis and company. Hearts with a Mission is starting a juvenile shelter here like they have in Medford. We already have the Gospel Rescue Mission and its residential rehab, and Faith House, a shelter for battered women and their children. The Salvation Army soup kitchen is another long-established feature in Grants Pass, and a few churches offer free meals, showers and clothing as well.
Now we need a cheap place to shower and sleep, a hostel, for people who are not intoxicated, not juvenile, not seeking help for addictions, not battered, or for whom there is no room in other shelters. It’s time to start a non-profit to build and run a large hostel so people who are willing to be quiet and behave well can pay $5 to $10 to shower and spend the night, no searches, no applications, no questions asked. It can be a soft place to land for those who find themselves on our street without shelter for any reason, and even for some thrifty travelers.
We call it the Restwell Center. We are the Friends of the Restwell Center. We want to build a super-hostel, a big room full of cots, dimly lit and watched over by a guardian and cameras; also showers; lockers; a reading room with information on local services; dog kennels, and a classroom.
We are currently looking at the closed Ray’s grocery store on north 7th Street, which has been for sale for a while, as the perfect building and property in the best location for our purpose. It has a fairly large, open building with proper plumbing and a parking lot with a lot of landscaping space that is a maintenance liability for most any other business. But that gardening space is an asset for us, because we also want to offer paid on-the-job training for gardeners and janitors, and use it to grow fruits, flowers, greens and herbs that people can pick and eat. Besides paid job training, the Restwell Center will offer 11 full-time jobs and 10 part-time.
A year or so ago, an apartment building in Grants Pass was bought by a non-profit agency to create housing for drug addicts. The tenants were told that they had to find another place to live, in a city with a very tight rental market. They were given enough time for most of them to find a place; not all managed to. It is still empty.
Landlords have been evicting tenants on 30 days notice; remodeling; and charging higher rents to new tenants. Cheap, problematic motels have been shut down, pushing their tenants onto other motels or the street. People are always getting kicked out of homes or have to leave. This year’s homeless count revealed that we have over 1,000 people without homes in Josephine County, up from 700-800 at the beginning of the recession.
Compared to the need, available shelters are relatively small: the largest one, the Gospel Rescue Mission, can house up to 36 men and a larger number of women with their children. Its mission is to rehabilitate addicts through prayer, church attendance, volunteer work and quitting drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Most can stay only 30 days. They just stopped offering showers and meals to non-residents.
The new juvenile shelter will house 18 youths. And with the Sobering Center now open, we don’t want people getting drunk and disorderly this winter just to sleep out of the cold for a night. To use the Restwell Center, one will have to be relatively sober and orderly or end up in the Sobering Center.
Many people are camping in the weeds, bushes, alleys or abandoned houses, learning the ways of vagrants who scatter litter and look for mature weeds and old litter that shows no one is paying attention to a place.
Such places are dangerous as well as dirty, wet, cold and hot and not good for anyone’s mood or mind, driving people to drugs and alcohol, keeping them unable to find a job because they are not clean or well-rested. We have laws against camping on other people’s property or public property, but they cannot be properly enforced without a legal alternative.
The Center will be sustainably funded by bed rentals in times like these, when the demand is great. Cot vouchers will be sold to anyone who wants to buy them, to give to beggars instead of cash. Fundraisers will be needed only when times are so good that demand is down, the opposite of most other charities.
There are many people in need of shelter who have income, just not enough to rent an apartment. Some have jobs; some have Social Security or General Assistance. Using this Center can help them keep a job or find one while saving up for a place, or simply keep a roof over their heads and stay clean and dry indefinitely.
The need for your assistance is great and urgent. Part of the urgency is that the old Rays property could be sold before we can buy it, which would force us to buy and build in another location not as good. We need a leader for this project,one who has connections and can ask the right people to be on our board. We need a bookkeeper, volunteer now, paid once we have the money. And we need at least $1000 more to start our non-profit and be able to apply for grants.
I recently stepped down from leading this project because I am not qualified, not having the connections, credibility, or the leadership skills. I am a natural gardener, gardening teacher, writer and researcher. I can research and write grants; later I can garden and teach.
If you want to be part of this project, please join Friends of the Restwell Center on Facebook; and/or donate at GoFundMe.com/ Restwell Center right away.
Organizer
Rycke Brown
Organizer
Grants Pass, OR
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