As the need for homeless services has increased by 18 percent across the state, organizations have had to face some of greatest need for homeless services in the last few years.
With the high need for homeless services, various organizations attempt to meet that need in the Upstate daily, including Harvest Hope Food Bank, which Chad Scott, the organization’s Vice President of Philanthropy, said has seen a roughly 20 percent in need since after the first COVID lockdowns.
“We’ve seen ebbs and flows. We’ve never seen a sustained need for food since we have since the COVID crisis,” Scott said. “We’ve seen the number of people at our agencies, at our hundred agencies in the Upstate who are distributing food on our behalf, we’ve seen that increase to levels that we’ve never seen in our 41-year history.”
Miracle Hill’s Tim Brown, the Vice President of Adult Ministries, said their organization’s housing services saw a near opposite response during the pandemic, but that their roughly 500 Upstate beds have regularly been at or near capacity since the end of those first lockdowns, especially during the winter months.
“As the Spring comes in, there’ll be some transition out of shelter. We’ll have more beds available,” Brown said. “But typically, not that much. It may be 10 or 20 beds at any given time that might be available in the shelter.”
Harvest Hope is a food bank that collects and distributes food to roughly 100 food pantries around the Upstate that feed thousands of hungry individuals on a regular basis. Chad Scott explained that, just at their White Horse Road location, they regularly feed up to 500 people per day three times per week.
Scott said the organization can go through roughly eight million pounds of food per year through just their Upstate locations around Greenville and Laurens.
You can listen to the full interview with Scott below:
Miracle Hill also provides food bank and food pantry services in the Upstate. But on top of this, they also provide other services such as shelters.
They provide three separate types of housing for homeless individuals, cold weather housing, long-term housing, and transitional housing.
Cold weather housing is one-night housing the organization opens when temperatures reach below 40 degrees, or 43 degrees during rain, which saw significant use during the cold wave the Upstate experienced earlier this season.
Brown explained that this shelter offers roughly 225 beds in the Upstate on top of the regular 500 beds he said are regularly at or near capacity.
Long-term housing includes Miracle Hill’s crisis shelter, where individuals who find themselves homeless may come to stay for up to 30 days as they search for a job after losing their home.
Tim Brown explained that those who need help, such as mental health services, will often be transitioned into their New Life program after the 30 days.
This program is where transitional housing comes into play.
The New Life program is meant to help these individuals stabilize their lives by providing very cheap housing as they get help and search for opportunities for work.
Individuals in the program will stay in the transitional housing, usually for less than a year, as they go through this program before often moving into affordable housing.
Brown said that the average time it takes for someone to go trough this program is roughly six months.
You can listen to the full interview with Brown below:
