- Emergency shelter housed some 40 residents during the winter months
- Unclear whether operator Residents in Action — selected by City to purchase T.A. Wilson Academy — will stay in the building while sale is in process
- Videos show shelter layout and start of dismantling
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story)
An emotional day at T.A. Wilson Academy in Jackson as residents of the City’s temporary homeless shelter are forced to move out.
The City’s grant for a temporary solution to keep Jackson’s homeless indoors for the winter ended at midnight. It fell to Tashia Carter, CEO and Founder of Residents in Action, and her colleagues to move them out.
TASHIA CARTER: “I think we’ve all cried a couple of times — staff and the people who stay here....Yeah, it’s emotionally tolling.”
Carter says her staff have done their best to help with alternative housing. But about 22 of them, she says, still don’t know where they will be staying tonight.
Last minute fundraising was not enough to keep the shelter open.
I asked City Manager Jonathan Greene, who was on hand for the shut-down, whether the building’s future owners, Residents in Action, will be staying in the Wilson Complex…and on what terms. He says that remains to be determined.
JONATHAN GREENE: “Right now a lot of that stuff’s up in the air....Could there be an opportunity while we’re working on those things to lease the property from the City to continue operations? I could see that happening. It would take an act of City Council to make happen.”
Both Greene and Carter told me there had been outreach to other organizations to help those evicted today. But one of the most prominent — Jackson Interfaith Shelter — said they hadn’t been contacted by RiA or the City.
SHERYL SABO-GRIEVE, Director of Operations, Jackson Interfaith Shelter: “I did check with my staff — no one has heard from RiA…we don’t know what’s happening down there.”
Lack of communication notwithstanding, leaders of both agree emergency shelters are just a temporary fix. In fact, says Sabo-Grieve — who was once homeless herself — they can even make a bad situation worse.
SABO-GRIEVE: “We’ll see someone that’ll be here in the Shelter, they’ll be here for a while, they’re working well, they’re doing the things that they need to do to help them get permanent housing and stability…we keep them accountable for things. And then they decide to go to one of the temporary ones and when we see them — within two weeks, within a month — because they come down here to eat — all their progress is sliding. They go back to their old ways.”
Sabo-Grieve also says after a temporary shelter has closed, or money for hotels has run out, many are back to square one.
Carter knows the homeless need more than emergency warming — and hopes funders can change their mindset.
TASHIA CARTER: “Maybe it’s thinking outside of the box to reallocate those dollars to a program like this that supports connecting people to resources and helping them get food and serving as an advocate versus just plugging them in a hotel and leaving them there to fend for themselves.”
PREVIOUS VERSION OF THE STORY:
An emotional day at T.A. Wilson Academy in Jackson as residents of the City's temporary homeless shelter are forced to move out.
The City's grant ended at midnight for what was a temporary solution to keep Jackson's homeless indoors for the winter. It fell to Tashia Carter, CEO and Founder of Residents in Action, and her colleagues to move them out of both the pallet houses and T.A. Wilson Academy Annex today, where 40-some individuals had spent the past few months.
"I think we've all cried a couple of times — staff and the people who stay here....Yeah, it's emotionally tolling."
Carter says staff have done their best to help them into alternative housing. But about 22 of them, she says, still don't know where they will be staying tonight.
"As of Friday we had 35 people that we didn't know, you know, they had expressed that they had no support and they had nowhere else to go other than to return to the street, we're down to 22 now."
Some last minute fundraising by Residents in Action did not yield enough to keep the shelter open, and the organization still has no agreement with the City even to stay in the building the City has agreed to sell them.
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