CHARLESTON, W.Va.–The Kanawha Valley Collective will be one of 15 projects that will receive additional funding from the City of Charleston to help operate their warming centers.
Traci Strickland
Tuesday evening, the city voted to allocate an additional $50,000 to warming centers if they go over their initial amount of $100,000 that they received last year.
The collective, has had a warming center opened at the Bream Neighborhood Shop at 317 West Washington Street since January 13. Since there first night opening the temperatures has continuously gone down, especially Monday and Tuesday night with it being in the single digits every night.
KVC’s Executive Director Traci Strickland said that before the city gave them money to help, they were on a volunteer basis for six years, where they could only have a warming center open for three nights max, before volunteers had to go back to their other jobs.
“We would not be able to have addressed this January on a volunteer basis, this money is critical because it allows us to hire staff to come in and work, rather than relying on either community volunteers or volunteers from different agencies that would come in,” Strickland said.
Being able to have the staff for these warming centers have allowed them, just this month, to have opened 16 warming centers in a 22-day period because of the low temperatures and the snow storms the state has been getting.
She says that the numbers just continue to grow since they opened their first center after a huge winter storm hit the mountain state.
“Probably since we’ve started the warming centers, like the 13th of January, cause we had three in a row and now we’re going to have quite a few in a row, we’ve been seeing over 100 people on average every night with 75 to 80 people sleeping on average, but again those numbers just to go up and the colder it gets the more they go up,” she said.
Monday night she said that they saw 112 people with about 85 people sleeping there overnight.
The warming center is open from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Strickland says that the reason that the collective does this is because they offer other services to the people who do decide to sleep there overnight.
They have a bus service that will take those people to Manna Meal in downtown Charleston if they want to. After they are done there, they have the choice to walk to KVC’s office which opens at 8:30 a.m. and is open until 7 at night when they open a warming center.
She also said that Bream, the shop that they use to open the warming centers, also needs their space to offer their services.
“Bream has services that they offer during the day for people in the community that come in and for people that are experiencing homelessness,” Strickland said. “For warming centers cots are set up all through the neighborhood shop so we have to tear down a warming center in order for the neighborhood shop to offer their day time services.”
She says that a lot of work went into making sure that those people who need somewhere to go during the day and night, have that.
“We’ve worked really hard to kind of put almost like this puzzle of services together so that people don’t have to be outside,” she said. “Because I think we’re in a three-day period where it’s not getting above 20 at any point in the day.”