Developments continue for William’s House of Hope

ANTIGO — Board members for William’s House of Hope briefed community members on recent assistance the organization provided to local homeless individuals as well as developments in their larger campaign to establish a homeless shelter in the community.

William’s House of Hope President Nicole Barron said they have made inroads towards that second goal.

“We do have a meeting with the mayor on Wednesday where we’re going to go over ordinances, conditions, zoning requirements…we need to make sure we’re dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s so that we don’t start something that we’re not able to keep going and it gets shut down in a week or two. So we’re making sure that we’re following every protocol,” Barron said.

Barron said organization members hope they can purchase a building by the Fall.

“We do have a contract for us to start renting a facility to use as our office space for the time being, and then we have multiple options that we will have a facility come October. It’s honestly a blessing. So hopefully within a month, we’ll have our office space where we can conduct meetings, meet with clients, but we won’t be able to house them, so that’s where the zoning would have to come into play before we would set up as a warming center or a shelter,” she said.

According to board member Amber Richards, the group has ramped up fundraising efforts recently due to a second obstacle: money.

“We do need more funding to purchase the building, but some of the grants we’re pursuing we’re ineligible for because they’re saying there’s another shelter in the area, and that shelter is AVAIL,” Richards said. “But that shelter is for a very specific population, which is for those escaping domestic violence or those that have experienced sexual assault. So they service that community, but there’s whole other branches of the community that are not serviced by that shelter. So we’re coming up against some resistance funding-wise on that end.”

Richards said the group remains confident that they will accomplish what they set out to.

“All of us have a deep passion and a deep purpose for this mission, so we are of the mindset like, ‘This is absolutely happening, and we will find a way to make it happen,’” Richards said. “But yes, we need partners. We need ongoing support. We need all of it to really have it come to fruition for us.”

Some organization members have been tasked with touring shelters in neighboring communities and reporting back to the board about their operation.

“She is going to a bunch of different shelters and just learning their protocols and how they operate and things like that,” said William’s House of Hope Vice President Dylan Johnson. “It’s really critical feedback for us to know how we should go about structuring our facility once we reach that point.”

“We’re looking at how other communities are doing this successfully,” Richards said. “How many spaces do they have? How many people can they house? How many volunteers do they need? What is their staff looking like? What are their meals looking like? What is their laundry looking like? Every aspect really we’re looking at.”

Johnson and Barron provided a breakdown of the 53 individuals they said William’s House of Hope has assisted since it formed just over two months ago.

“Currently, with those 53 unique individuals, 40 percent were children, and 10 percent were over the age of 50. We have done 33 total hotel stays to date,” said Johnson, who later shed further light on why children have made up an outsized proportion of those they’ve aided. “It’s not the kids calling us themselves, it’s their parents. We had a family with 10 children and we put them all in a hotel. We assisted them and got them on a better path to transitional housing. That’s generally the situation with the children — they’re in families that are in crisis.”

Richards said crises and bad breaks involving issues such as unfair treatment from landlords can leave people homeless.

“Because of tragic situations — there’s maybe domestic violence, there might be a loss of a job, there might be death somewhere in the family and they had to leave that space — there’s a number of reasons why a family unit might become unhoused,” Richards said. “But we see it very much affecting the kids, because not only are the kids now unhoused, they’re also out of school. So we’re working both of those dynamics to try to support them, because we really want them to return to stability as soon as possible.”

Johnson encouraged community members to help by donating, volunteering, and spreading information about William’s House of Hope.

“Most of this is community funded and grants and fundraisers and stuff like that, so even if you see a jar at a gas station or at any of the stores around town, every dollar has helped — I can’t stress that enough,” Johnson said. “Those little donation jars have brought in a significant amount of money to help us get off the ground initially. Those were our first hotel stays, so every nickel and dime has helped our organization grow.”