Unhoused people who stay at Helping Hands of Springfield’s shelter say they are forced to leave the building every day for an hour and sometimes two each afternoon, bundled up and shivering in the cold, while workers clean the building and then check clients back in again.
Several clients said the situation existed even before the new shelter was opened along South Dirksen Parkway in January 2024. Nonprofit Helping Hands, which receives funding from the state and federal government and operates with a $3 million annual budget, previously operated in downtown Springfield at 1023 E. Washington St.
Being outside in the winter for an hour or two with temperatures in the 30s and below poses risks to their health, five of the clients told Illinois Times.
“What happens when someone dies out there?” asked Helping Hands client Brad Schroeder, 59. He operated his disc jockey music service in the Springfield area for 32 years but saw a steep decline in business during the COVID-19 business and said he has stayed at the shelter for about a month.
“I’ve never been treated worse in my life,” Schroeder said. “We are not treated as homeless. We are treated as prisoners or prisoners of war.”
William Mauldin, 76, who has been at the shelter for a few days, said, “They make me stand outside when I have arthritis.”
Helping Hands Acting Executive Director Patti Crouch said the complaints about wait times may be accurate, but some clients are able to remain inside if they volunteer to help clean. However, not everyone could be accommodated inside if all clients who stay at the shelter overnight volunteered, Crouch said.
Supporting Schroeder’s account of the wait times were Mauldin and fellow clients Richard Brown, 47, and Willard Fritcher, 52, who have been at the shelter for three months, and Jordan Tate, 34, who has been there two months.
The five men said they appreciate having a roof over their head, a place to sleep and good food to eat, but they said having to wait outside a building with plenty of room to segregate clients while cleaning takes place makes no sense.
The 22,000-square-foot shelter, in part of a building owned by Sangamon County government that used to be part of the county’s Juvenile Detention Center, is rented to Helping Hands for $1 a year and replaced Helping Hands’ 15,000-square-foot shelter on East Washington.
The space was renovated for Helping Hands with $9 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding, but Crouch said the space still isn’t large enough to segregate all of the clients when the check-in process and cleaning takes place each day.
Between 4 and 6 p.m. every day, clients are required to leave and go outside, she said. And because the check-in process is tedious, the five men said it takes an average of one to two hours for most clients to get back inside after they go through a metal detector.
Many clients leave the building during the day, though they’re not required to leave and meals are provided on-site, according to Crouch, who is not related to Sangamon County Sheriff Paula Crouch.
Between 120 and 150 clients spend the night at the shelter, Crouch said. All clients need to go outside and then be checked in for the night to make sure they aren’t carrying drugs or weapons into the building, and to make sure the agency has accurate counts to report in requests for funding, she said.
Having to be outside in the cold isn’t the best situation for clients, though she said some clients willingly spend hours outside during the day and then complain about having to be outside during the cleaning and check-in process, she said.
“We have heard their concerns,” Crouch said. “Sure, it worries us, but there’s only so much we can do.”
The situation at Helping Hands isn’t unique, she said, noting that shelters for people experiencing homelessness in Peoria and Rockford use a similar check-in process.
“It’s not something we made up to punish them,” Crouch said. “They tend to find ways to find blame with our processes.”
The agency has other problems, too, the five clients told Illinois Times.
Schroeder, who has heart disease and is a stroke survivor, said he has been denied his daily medicine several times when he didn’t show up on time at the assigned location in the shelter at 8 p.m.
The men said they have received little to no help from the staff in securing employment or affordable housing. They have to pay for bus transportation to downtown Springfield and said medical services at the shelter are haphazard and unorganized.
Crouch said she has little direct contact with shelter clients but would be willing to meet with the men to discuss their concerns.
But she said it’s not the shelter’s policy to deny medicine to clients. Housing services were expanded as part of the move to the new shelter, which is about four miles southeast of the former shelter site, but she said it can still take several months to work with clients, find appropriate housing for them and move them in.
Assistance with finding employment is provided, but there’s only one caseworker who handles that service, Crouch said. The need is great, so she didn’t doubt that the men were dissatisfied with a lack of one-on-one attention.
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The shelter has a limited number of SMTD bus passes and tokens for clients who need transportation to complete specific tasks such as medical appointments, Crouch said. Helping Hands operates a shuttle service with vans during the afternoon and evening that transports clients for free from downtown Springfield to the shelter, but not from the shelter back downtown, she said.
Crouch apologized for the initial response Illinois Times received when the newspaper inquired with agency officials about the complaints.
When Crouch wasn’t available, Jilnita Johnson, Helping Hands’ director of retention, recruitment, development and direction told the newspaper that the clients’ complaints about waiting times outside were false.
Johnson said the maximum wait was 25 minutes, not two hours. She said an Illinois Times reporter photographed clients standing and sitting outside the shelter on Dec. 19 “with none of the management knowing you were there.”
When the reporter asked about Schroeder’s description of the up to two-hour outdoor waits, Johnson replied: “If you are going to take the information from the guy that told you, who is a homeless resident, over what I’ve just told you, there’s nothing I can do to appease your answer because I’ve answered it three times now.”
Johnson, who is second-in-command at the agency, didn’t respond when asked about Schroeder’s denial-of-medicine complaint.
The reporter asked why Schroeder, who said he holds associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in communications, would be making up complaints. Johnson replied that Schroeder wants attention from the news media.
“A better question is why is somebody with a college degree and running businesses and things like that is at the shelter,” Johnson said.
Before hanging up on an Illinois Times reporter, she said, “When you take information from people who are generally unhappy because they can’t make the rules and don’t like the rules, this is where we end up.”
Crouch said Johnson and other staff members at the shelter have been under a lot of stress recently when dealing with drug overdoses and other issues involving clients.
The shelter manager position has been vacant for several months, according to Crouch, a longtime Helping Hands board member and retired AIG insurance manager. Crouch said she has filled in as executive director since former director Laura Davis resigned at the end of May for medical reasons.
A permanent executive director, Robert Gillespie, a former social worker who worked as a top executive at nonprofit Hemophilia of Georgia, will start at Helping Hands on Jan. 6, Crouch said.
She said she believes the five clients who spoke to the newspaper don’t represent the majority of clients who are satisfied with the shelter’s services.
Helping Hands has many success stories from clients who are grateful for Helping Hands’ role in turning around their lives, she said.
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This article appears in Best films and scenes of 2024.
