City Mission steps up in pandemic

Homeless people in Hancock County who fall ill to coronavirus have a rare benefit: a homeless shelter which shelters them. It's hard to find such a place in the rest of northwest Ohio. City Mission of Findlay appears to have been the only shelter in the region to offer lodging to homeless people infected with coronavirus. At least 50 coronavirus-infected clients have stayed there since the start of the pandemic. City Mission, at 510 W. Main Cross St., has made Hancock County stand out. "Some communities, truly, when they would have a homeless person … that needed a place to go, that county had nowhere for them," said Gary Bright, injury prevention program supervisor at Hancock Public Health. "They were calling us" to house their homeless in Hancock County, Bright said of the neighboring counties. But City Mission, which has used its family wing of five rooms for coronavirus-infected homeless people, has been stretched to its limits. The facility has more recently had to decline those from outside Hancock County. "We don't want to open the Mission up to taking care of all of northwest Ohio," Bright said. "But we told (other communities) what our Mission was doing and said, 'If you have a facility like that you could look at that type of model.'" The five rooms in the homeless shelter's family wing have four beds each. Infected males can be kept with other males, and females with other females. Infected clients do not have go through the shelter — which safeguards noninfected clients and staff — because each room in the family wing has locked entrances to the outside. Meals can be delivered from the outside. City Mission's staff and its commitment to helping all homeless also was critical, said Executive Director Kathryn Bausman. "We saw this need. We have homeless people," Bausman said. "You tell someone to quarantine. Well, that's kind of hard to do in a car or in a home camp." "We live to serve those people. That's why we exist is to help people, and the most vulnerable people," she said. "You're talking about a homeless person that has COVID who probably has existing health issues. The concept of not helping them never crossed our minds." Helping the homeless who are infected involves challenges. It also is a difficulty for some noninfected homeless persons, who must to be moved from City Mission to a local hotel to make room in the family wing for the infected. For those relocated clients, it is a second painful dislocation from home. City Mission staffers took pains to ensure the displaced clients knew they were still connected with them, Bausman said. "A family comes here and we're then asking them, 'I understand, but we're asking you to leave again,'" she said. "We're dislocating them. That was hard." But staff remained in contact with clients at the hotel, tending to their needs in addition to the needs of those at the shelter. City Mission advocates "go to the hotel, making sure they're OK and then the transportation, getting them where they need to be. Getting the food to them three times a day," Bausman said. Transportation is important because homeless people do not get a ticket to an appointment-free life. Many had health conditions before the pandemic. They have appointments for medical care, legal needs, job-related meetings and searches, mental health evaluations, getting children into school or daycare. In the earlier days of the pandemic, when Bright and other health department staff were considering where to house Hancock County's coronavirus-infected homeless, City Mission was not first on the list. "We always thought it would have been nice to have a local hotel to house those people," Bright said. "But there really was no hotel in the entire county that we could find. Most of them weren't willing to host COVID-positive people, period." The few that were willing had expensive strings attached. They "wanted us to rent out either an entire floor just to get one room or they wanted us to rent out at least three rooms, which would be like an empty room on either side of the positive person. You know, renting out three rooms for one person," he said. It all would have been paid for with federal money, but it still would not have been a responsible way to spend the money, Bright said. For a time, the University of Findlay had some vacant residential space which it shared. But City Mission stepped up for the long haul and has been happy to do so. "The City Mission is a faith-based organization. It's about service. We really try to meet the needs of people where they are," said Chuck Bishop, president of the Mission board. "We deal with a population that doesn't have much in the way of alternatives. We view the Mission as a first line of defense for homelessness and hunger." "They've never asked for a single thing," Bright said of City Mission. "Throughout this entire ordeal they haven't asked for any recognition. They haven't even asked for any additional funding to help with all of this other than, again, if they had to displace a family to go to a hotel or something they, of course, wanted help paying for that." "But they've never said, 'We can't afford to do this,' or 'it's inconvenient,' or anything," Bright said. "It was always just, 'Yup, we can do that.'" Wilin: 419-427-8413