Group pushes to create daytime resource center for homeless in Eau Claire

Jun. 10—EAU CLAIRE — Life on the street is hard.

With that premise in mind, a coalition of individuals and organizations has formed with the goal of making life at least a little bit easier for people in Eau Claire with no place to call home.

The Chippewa Valley Day Resource Center Steering Committee's mission is to establish a daytime shelter for unhoused individuals by Nov. 1, 2025.

The effort arose from a community task force last year that worked to find a temporary solution to the lack of a place for the homeless to seek refuge from the cold last winter, both during the day and at night if Sojourner House, the city's largest homeless shelter, reached capacity.

Now the advocates have their sights set on a permanent daytime solution.

"The only shelter and safe space we have for people is from 7 o'clock at night until 8 in the morning," said committee member Susan Wolfgram, co-chair of the Affordable Housing Task Force for Joining Our Neighbors Advancing Hope, a local community justice organization best known as JONAH. "The rest of the time folks are deteriorating physically and mentally being on the unforgiving streets day in and day out."

The need is apparent when talking to homeless residents, who often hang out in city parks, downtown businesses or under bridges during the day because they have no place else to go, said committee member Michelle Pride, a volunteer with the Chippewa Valley Street Ministry, a local group that advocates for and provides services to the homeless.

A survey last year seeking to assess the greatest needs of people experiencing homelessness in Eau Claire confirmed the gap in services. Aside from the obvious top priority — securing their own apartment — respondents identified finding a place to stay during the day and having access to bathrooms, food, health care, transit, storage and laundry facilities as their most pressing needs.

"Life's tough without a permanent house," Pride said. "When you're in crisis all the time, it's hard to move on to the next step. When you're only thinking about where will I get a drink of water, how will I go to the bathroom or how will I get out of the weather, it's difficult to get beyond that."

By ensuring users have access to food, water, shelter and other basic needs, a day center could give people the stability to take the steps necessary to put homelessness behind them, she said.

Wolfgram called it a "moral imperative" to create a resource center where people can escape the streets she said can claim lives, render people permanently disabled mentally and physically, funnel people through the legal system and create barriers to employment, education, civic participation and overall happiness.

"We in this community have decided to stand together to make the right choice," Wolfgram said.

Beyond that, she said a day center would save taxpayer money devoted to 911 calls, emergency department visits, mental health crises and jail time.

"We cannot afford not to have a day resource center," Wolfgram said, noting that such a facility would give unhoused individuals a safe and dignified space to be while they are waiting for a home.

The absence of a day center became an issue when Sojourner House, operated by Catholic Charities, moved back to its regular downtown site in April 2021 after spending much of the early part of the pandemic in temporary large locations — Hobbs Ice Arena and the former Hansen's IGA store in Shopko Plaza — to allow for more social distancing during a health emergency.

At the temporary sites, Sojourner House partnered with Lutheran Social Services to provide 24/7 care. But that ended when Sojourner returned to its 618 S. Barstow St. location and its previous overnight-only hours of operation. At the same time, Lutheran Social Services changed its model from offering daytime drop-in services at the former Positive Avenues to offering more comprehensive services through scheduled or walk-in options at the renamed Gaining Ground.

The homeless population lost another option for daytime respite with the unavailability of L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, which is undergoing renovation and temporarily moved to a site out of downtown.

With the loss of those facilities, more Eau Claire residents started noticing the large number of homeless people around town.

Eau Claire City Engineer and Deputy City Manager Dave Solberg said the increased visibility of unhoused residents in the past couple of years has brought the problem out in the open.

"It's not Eau Claire's secret anymore and, frankly, it makes people uncomfortable," said Solberg, another member of the day center committee "The good thing is that it helped start these conversations about finding solutions."

The Chippewa Valley Day Resource Center Steering Committee, composed of advocates and representatives of local government and nonprofits, has been meeting monthly since January.

The group also has created subcommittees focusing on topics such as studying similar facilities in other cities, identifying potential funding sources and considering potential sites, including one downtown location offered as a possibility by a local developer.

Solberg, who sits on the funding subcommittee, said he expects the facility to require a mix of grants and money from public and private sources, ideally with service provider tenants paying enough rent to pay for operating expenses.

"We are trying to look under every stone to see what funding sources are out there," Solberg said.

The commitment of the large group of volunteers, combined with the clear need in the community, has Solberg feeling optimistic the effort will accomplish its goal.

In the meantime, the plan is that last winter's temporary fix — free city bus passes to help homeless people access services and jobs, combined with a warming center in a vacant downtown church building to give them an indoor space to go when buses aren't running and on days with extremely cold temperatures — will continue through the next three winters.

Advocates called the warming center necessary but emphasized it's just a stopgap solution that doesn't help in other seasons.

"Having a place to be cool and having enough water are always issues in summer," Pride said. "So is finding shelter during a storm."