Jon Hoover is assistant executive director of Groundworks Collaborative.
BRATTLEBORO-This community needs to come together to put Groundworks Collaborative's homeless services out of business.
Groundworks operates a 34-bed shelter that has expanded to serve up to 46 individuals this winter. Meanwhile, Groundworks is also planning to open a separate 40-bed shelter in 2026. Additionally, the organization serves and supports numerous unsheltered individuals on any given night, while more individuals reside in motels as emergency shelter throughout our community.
While shelter is an essential, necessary, and life-saving service, it is not the highest and best use of community resources.
Before explaining why I make this provocative statement, let me share my perspective: In 2014, I started work at Groundworks' predecessor organization, Morningside Shelter, where we operated 30 beds and were soon to merge with our partner, the Brattleboro Area Drop-in Center, which operated a seasonal overflow shelter for upwards of 20 people.
Even at that time, for a community of our size, this level of homelessness was unacceptable. Now, 11 years later and finding myself in the role of assistant executive director, the degree of this crisis has only grown.
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There's a myth circulating in the community that Groundworks only wants to see homelessness grow because it's "good for business." There's an even more ridiculous narrative that we import people from out of the area to fill beds in order to get paid per person, with an incentive to have a full shelter.
Why would we, as professionals who have tremendous insight into the suffering and deprivation of homelessness, bring people from out of the area when our shelter is already full and we regularly have to turn people away?
Groundworks operates numerous programs, and it is true that our shelter programming is our biggest expense. While it's fair to say that running shelters is a big part of our operation, it's not our passion or mission.
What motivates our staff, from shelter advocates to the executive director, is helping people - specifically, helping people in some of the most vulnerable circumstances.
We look forward to the day - and it may take years for enough housing to be available - when our shelter on South Main Street can be converted to a general-use community center and our shelter on Royal Road can be available for brief stays to help people get back on their feet.
Our focus right now may be operating shelters, but our passion is helping people access stable and sustainable permanent housing. In the future, if that energy can be devoted to helping people maintain secure housing, that would be a tremendous success.
If our community reaches a point where even these supportive services are no longer needed, we will gladly close our doors. Our compassionate and talented staff can then apply their Groundworks experience to helping people face other life challenges.
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The saying goes: "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan." In reality, the crisis in which we find ourselves has a multitude of causes, informed by policy choices - many made decades ago - and as a result of systemic failures that present similarly in every county in this country.
That said, let us all be parents of success.
Groundworks will continue to do our part in providing necessary and life-saving emergency shelter while also working with the community to build out the future we all seek. By all means, we would love nothing more than to put ourselves out of business and to no longer be needed in this community.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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