MOUNT VERNON – For most, the holiday season is a time of togetherness. It’s a time where friends and family gather to rehash old memories and make new ones. The mood is celebratory and warm, and nobody feels alone.

For the area’s homeless, however, the holiday season is quite different.

Joe Springer would know. As the operations manager of The Winter Sanctuary, Knox County’s lone emergency homeless shelter, he has seen the faces and felt the emotion of the guests who inhabit his shelter during this time of the year.

It’s never easy to be homeless, Springer says. In fact, for most, this is rock bottom. But the holidays take a particularly harsh toll.

“I think a lot of our guests, because of those broken relationships, Christmas can be a very difficult time for them,” Springer said Tuesday morning, sitting on a couch in the shelter’s living room. “Family that they don’t have relationships with any more, or broken relationships… the emotions are definitely stirred a little bit around the holidays.”

That’s why Springer and the shelter’s volunteer staff plan to take action to brighten up the holiday experience for those with nowhere else to go.

This year, volunteers have signed up for extra two-hour shifts on Christmas Day, so that guests are able to stay the entire day. Typically, the shelter (located at 401 W. Vine St.) is only open from 6:30 p.m. to 9 a.m. on weekdays so that guests can use the daytime hours to get back on their feet – whether that means applying for jobs, housing, or seeking drug treatment.

In addition, one of the shelter’s volunteers and his mother have planned to cook a full-fledged Christmas meal for all of the guests on Christmas Day. Marco’s Pizza has also pitched in to provide pizza on Christmas Eve.

This outreach isn’t out-of-the-ordinary, though. Ann Marie Wiley, who serves as a guest advocate at the shelter, said it’s become a Christmas tradition for many local volunteers.

“We’ve had people do it year after year,” Wiley said. “We’ve, in the past, had churches that would sometimes get a group together that would come in and provide a meal on Christmas or Thanksgiving, too. So the community is very supportive of us and of our guests.

“They really go out of their way to contribute goods and food and money and time. I mean, we’re very fortunate.”

Springer said individual community members typically lend a helping hand this time of the year as well. Donations of food, toiletries, stockings, gloves and hats spike around the holiday season. Even signature Christmas delicacies are donated to the shelter in batches.

“I mean, typically our guests have way more cookies than they could eat on Christmas,” Springer, who has volunteered with the shelter since 2015, said with a smile. “It’s pretty cool to see the love of our community and how supportive they are of our guests.”

Finding a way out

There are currently 14 men and three women inhabiting the shelter (as of Dec. 18), Springer said, which is fewer than initially came at the start of the winter season (the shelter is open from November to April).

This is good news, Springer said, as it means guests have been successful in moving on.

“People are getting apartments and they’re finding places to go and they don’t need us,” Springer said. “That’s what we want, that’s our goal – to not just provide emergency shelter, but to also advocate for our guests getting into apartments and working on themselves, working on those issues that caused them to be homeless in the first place.”

Springer and part-time advocates like Wiley meet with guests twice a week to establish goals and a plan to work towards them. For some, this means housing or addiction treatment. For others, the starting point is much more distant.

“There’s different levels of what you might consider homeless,” Springer said.

Springer has helped guests that “have big goals, like getting an apartment, getting a job,” and others who are seeking more basic needs before those steps can be taken. He said some come in without an ID card, and because they don’t have an ID card, they can’t get their birth certificate or social security number, which would allow them to apply for a job.

The goal for The Winter Sanctuary, Springer said, is to meet the guests where they’re at. If that means referring them to Riverside Recovery Services or The Freedom Center for drug treatment, or to The Main Place for mental health care, or to BHP to get involved with housing programs, then that’s what they will do.

While success is viewed on an individual basis, Springer said the overarching goal is to “connect them to the resources to develop a plan of how to achieve those goals.” The shelter is used as a transitional refuge for those who need it, not as a permanent solution.

“Our goal for all our guests is to get them into independent living situations,” Springer said. “And for some people, it’s just a matter of getting a job and getting some help getting into an apartment.”

Since Springer joined The Winter Sanctuary full-time in December 2017 (he also started CHOMP Ministries, a local, mobile food bank, in 2015), the shelter has seen success stories. He beamed about an 18-year old woman last year who came to the shelter to avoid a volatile home situation. She now has her own apartment and job, and is looking to potentially attend college in the future.

But not every situation goes that smoothly. Many guests come to the shelter as a last resort – they’ve been living down by the river or in a car, and they need help because their lives depend on it. Springer sees a wide range of situations, and each guest has their own story.

For some, it takes months to get back on their feet. For others, just days. Some journeys are more successful than others.

“Most of our guests, they just don’t have anywhere to go,” Springer said. “They’ve burnt every bridge relationship-wise with everybody in their life, friends and family. Sometimes it’s their fault, sometimes it’s not. But when they come here, a lot of times they don’t have those relationships.”

That’s why the extra Christmas support is important, Springer said. The holiday season is often a low point for many guests, and those volunteering can help them get through it.

“It’s so important for our volunteers to be in here interacting with them, accepting them and encouraging them,” Springer said. “Although this isn’t the best place to be on Christmas, most of our guests have spent Christmases in worse places than here – out under a bridge, living out of a car, couchsurfing. So I would say that it’s a day of mixed emotions for most of our guests.”

Hidden problem

Despite all the help The Winter Sanctuary receives during the holiday season, both Springer and Wiley fear that not enough people know about the homelessness issue in Knox County.

Springer called the issue a “hidden” one, as the local homeless population does not present itself like those that inhabit bigger cities. Instead of people out on the sidewalk panhandling, they’re living out of cars or in the forest, down by the river. They’re not as visible, Springer said, but they’re still there.

“A lot of people aren’t aware of the homeless problem in our community because it’s hidden. It’s not like in the city, where you see homeless people all over,” Springer said. “For someone who’s not associated with the shelter, they would never really know that they’re homeless. You see people every day that have no home, walking around. You just might not realize it.”

Springer said it’s hard to pinpoint how many people are homeless in Knox County because of the subdued nature of the population. There is a point-in-time study done one day every year, he said, where officials try to count how many homeless people are in the community at a certain time by searching for them. Due to safety concerns, however, Springer said those results are hardly accurate.

“I think there are much more than what’s counted there, but we make an effort to try to get some numbers on that,” he said. “But when the homeless problem is hidden like it is, it’s difficult.”

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual report, which was released last week, there were 10,249 homeless people counted in Ohio during the department’s point-in-time study this year. This is a 1.5 percent increase from last year’s total. The numbers are not broken down by county.

As the only emergency homeless shelter in Knox County (although Kno-Ho-Co in Fredericktown has two family units and New Directions in Mount Vernon serves as a domestic abuse shelter), The Winter Sanctuary sees a good portion of the local homeless population. To keep the shelter running, Springer said 75-80 part-time volunteers help man six shifts each day during the winter months.

With more awareness of the local homelessness problem, however, Springer believes the shelter could receive more volunteers and financial assistance. This would allow the shelter to stay open longer than seven months and potentially fund family units.

Springer said the shelter makes every effort to educate the community on homelessness, which he hopes will spread awareness.

“We’re talking about it, going to churches and clubs and talking to people about the homeless problem that we have in our community,” Springer said. “I think there’s a lot of people with great hearts in our community, this is an incredibly giving community. And I think raising awareness will get more people involved and we can better address this problem, the more we get the word out.”