This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
BURLINGTON – Sarah Russell steered the shuttle bus into the grocery store parking lot where, a few minutes before, a stranger had called to alert her that a man lay huddled against the building in a nest of sleeping bags.
Temperatures were quickly sliding and a harsh wind howled. The night of Friday, Jan. 23 was shaping up to be among the coldest yet of the winter. Russell, emergency services director for the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, was spending the evening hours driving around Burlington and asking unhoused people if they had a place to sleep inside. If they didn’t, she offered them a seat aboard the shuttle and a bed at the city’s extreme cold weather shelter, which Russell and a small army of service providers working overtime hours open up when feels-like temperatures drop to minus 10 degrees.
About 60 people had already arrived at the shelter, and Russell expected the numbers to keep climbing. People had come from as far away as Middlebury and St. Johnsbury for a cot inside the community center gym, she said.
As high rates of homelessness in Vermont have persisted since the pandemic years — and state leaders have scaled back the state’s primary mode of cold-weather aid, the motel voucher program — extreme cold shelters like this one have become an increasingly crucial piece of Vermont’s response.
In prior years, just Burlington and Rutland have operated cold-weather emergency shelters paid for by the state. This winter, state officials have directed funding toward more sites and are now footing the bill for pop-up shelters in Bennington, Brattleboro, Montpelier and Newport, too. (Other, more informal cold weather shelters sometimes operate elsewhere, too).
The aim of these extreme cold shelters is to keep people alive amid bitter cold. Their expansion by the state is an implicit acknowledgement that a growing number of people experiencing homelessness in Vermont are living outside during the depths of winter. And the formidable effort it takes to open them within a few days’ notice can feel futile when temperatures inch above the state’s strict threshold and shelter guests are sent back out into the elements.
Russell pulled the shuttle bus against the curb of the Shelburne Road grocery store and approached the man in the sleeping bags. His hands were bare and raw. He explained that he had been staying at a nearby hotel with a friend before the friend had been admitted to the hospital a day prior. The people who saw him propped against the wall of Market 32 didn’t know him but, concerned for his life, found Russell’s phone number and called for help.
Russell helped gather the man’s blankets and food from a shopping cart and directed him into the bus.
“Here, you come on inside,” she said.
A herculean effort
Operating these ephemeral shelters requires a herculean amount of effort each night they run.
Ahead of this winter, state officials set aside about $1 million to expand the state’s network of extreme cold weather shelters. The advocacy group Vermont Interfaith Action is administering the grant funding to six local nonprofits and municipalities, which operate about 200 beds total.
The local shelters are triggered for “mandatory” activation when windchill temperatures drop to a sustained minus 10 degrees, though they can choose to operate when temperatures fall below 0. That trigger is looser than the minus 20 degree threshold the state had used in seasons past.
The state decided to bulk up the emergency shelter effort this winter in part because of the wind-down of the COVID-era motel voucher program, said Lily Sojourner, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity within the Department for Children and Families. The state had also witnessed a decrease in winter-long seasonal shelter beds during the pandemic and the years afterward, when volunteers stayed away because of health concerns, she added.
Ahead of this season, Sojourner and her team forecast that volunteer interest had rebounded enough to make more extreme cold shelters viable. These temporary shelter efforts supplement her office’s push to create more seasonal and year-round shelter beds, she said.
Even so, some of the smaller extreme cold shelters that rely on volunteers have struggled to fill shifts. In Montpelier, shelter coordinator Andrea Stander said she has been brainstorming new ways to underscore the urgency of the shelter effort each time she blasts an email out to volunteers, trying to get them to agree to work overnight hours on a quick turnaround.
“It’s a little nerve-wracking, because we can’t open if we don’t have all the volunteers covered,” she said.
In Bennington, the extreme cold shelter did not open during a cold snap that occurred over Christmas because staff members were out of town, according to Roxanne Carelli, executive director of operational development and shelter services at Bennington County Coalition for the Homeless.
Space has proven another hurdle for some shelters. In Brattleboro, a shelter at a local church secured a waiver from the state Division of Fire Safety to host 15 guests on nights when temperatures fall below zero. The shelter has raised local funding to remain open on warmer nights, too, but on those nights the state has cleared them to have only eight beds.
“What really sucks is when we have a night with 15 beds, and then the very next night, we go back to eight beds, and it’s only a couple degrees warmer outside,” said Cristina Shayonye, the shelter director. “I have to tell half of the people who show up that the state of Vermont thinks it's safer for them to sleep outside than it is for them to sleep in the same beds they slept in last night.”
Getting the word out that the shelters are open is its own project. In Montpelier, Stander built a simple website that indicates whether or not the shelter is open each day. Other locations post updates on Facebook or tell guests to call 2-1-1.
But for people without access to the internet or a phone, “it’s really just walking by at 8 o’clock at night and seeing if there’s lights on,” said Casey Winterson, director of economic and community based services at Northeast Kingdom Community Action, which runs the shelter in Newport. “Which is certainly challenging… if you’re cold and have nowhere to go.”
Disaster mode
Setting up cots on Friday afternoon, Russell said she often hears from people who want to see the Burlington extreme cold weather shelter open all the time. But this model more closely resembles a response to a flood than to an ongoing need, she said.
Run by paid staff and not volunteers, opening the shelter requires Russell and much of her staff to shift into triage mode. Ahead of the shelter’s opening, one CVOEO employee picked up 200 blankets from the University of Vermont Medical Center. Another cooked enough meals to feed the shelter guests for four nights, the amount of time the Burlington shelter planned to be open amid an arctic blast and subsequent blizzard.
Others gathered spare clothes, hand warmers, and overdose-reversing medication. Russell filled 70 overtime shifts with nonprofit staff, and fielded constant calls from people seeking a warm place to sleep. The late-hour shuttle runs were the last task in a days-long sprint of preparation.
“We can’t continue to rely on a disaster response over a sustained period of time — it’s just not sustainable,” Russell said. “If we had enough shelter capacity, we would never need to open this.”
In at least one mark of success, Vermont Public/VTDigger could not identify any reported deaths of people experiencing homelessness during the recent cold snap. Yet the existence of the cold weather shelters alone has not prevented deaths this season: One man, Richard Govea, died in December in Barre on a night when the network of shelters was running.
By Tuesday, when temperatures rose slightly, Russell’s team began to shut the shelter down. Looking at the forecast, she planned to reopen two days later — and begin the process over again.
