Just-open day room gaining clients

Opportunity House, a three-day-a-week day room, will finish its second week in existence on Friday, and it’s starting to pick up a little momentum.

“I feel like it’s going well,” said Chris Taylor, assistant director. “I’ve been looking at all of these puzzle pieces for two months now, and it’s been such a joy to see the pieces start coming together to form a bigger picture.”

Taylor, previously a case worker with Neighbor to Neighbor, has now seen some 15 clients come through the door, and that’s counting the zero people who came in on April 8 – day one. Therein lies one of the facility’s biggest hurdles, Taylor said.

“It’s our lack of exposure,” he said. “Our clientele maybe don’t have access to TV or newspapers so we have to depend on word of mouth. That is how we’ve been getting some of that handled. We’ve talked to the Salvation Army and Neighbor to Neighbor. And we had a client or two come from the emergency room at JRMC.”

Taylor’s title is assistant director, and he works for Depaul USA, which has contracted with the city of Pine Bluff to operate the facility. He and two others — a case worker and custodian — make up the staff.

Breakfast is between 7:30 and 8:30, and when a new person comes in, the first stop is with the case worker whose job it is to determine what the person’s needs are.

“Housing, jobs, clothing, Social Security cards or documentation, educational needs, that is what the case worker is here for,” Taylor said.

A man came in on Wednesday, and when he left, he was thinking about going to college.

“He had quite a few college credits,” Taylor said. “We told him that because he was homeless, he was eligible to receive quite a few scholarships and grants. So he is now excited about being able to sign up for college. He was one of my clients at Neighbor to Neighbor, and he’s fallen on harder times, so he was glad he came in today, very glad.”

As is the case with many new ventures, getting Opportunity House, located in the old First Ward Elementary School building on East Sixth Avenue, off the ground has not been without a few hiccups.

Mayor Shirley Washington’s intention was to have a homeless shelter for Pine Bluff because of a high number of homeless people in the city, but because of a lack of adequate financing, the facility opened as a day room from 7 a.m. until noon on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. During those periods, the goal was to give clients a hot breakfast and a sandwich for lunch, and to allow them to take a shower and wash their clothes.

It has been the city’s job to renovate the building to get it ready for use, but a volunteer noticed that the state health department had not put its stamp of approval on the shiny new kitchen, and the dryers would not work in the building, barring anyone from taking showers or washing clothes, Taylor said.

New dryers were delivered this week, he said, but getting the health department’s approval will be more problematic.

“I’ll have to go to Little Rock to handle that,” he said. “They will want to see all the paperwork — maps and plans and the like. I went to the health department office here and they told me I’d have to go to the state office in Little Rock. Until that happens, we can’t use the full amenities of the kitchen. So instead of a cooked breakfast of bacon and sausage and eggs and biscuits, we have Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits from the microwave.”

When city officials met with Depaul USA two years ago to hear from the nonprofit about its proposal to run the facility, Opportunity House was still being billed as a homeless shelter. Multiple articles in The Commercial at that time said the city had committed upward of $500,000 a year to run the facility with much of that coming from outside sources. Now, however, Washington says the city only ever promised to put up $100,000 a year. A Depaul USA executive has said even a full-time day room could require as much as five times more than what the city has committed.

And while the city is still referring to Opportunity House as a “homeless shelter,” most recently in a news release about an open house on May 2, Taylor said the incorrect reference is causing confusion.

“It’s not a homeless shelter,” he said. “I need people to stop calling it a shelter. This is a day center and not a shelter. People hear it’s a shelter and come in thinking they will be able to spend the night. I have to tell them we don’t have those services and we are not guaranteed that we will have those services unless funding greatly increases. That is the only way I can see that this will operate as a shelter.”

Cynthia Anderson, the mayor’s project manager for Opportunity House, said it was the city’s goal to build and operate the facility without tax dollars, but at least in the early going, most of the money spent has been from tax dollars.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request to the city by The Commercial, city officials said Pine Bluff’s portion of the cost has been $694,000, which was combined with $542,000 in federal money. Federal dollars also paid for about $88,000 in architect fees. The building was purchased from the state Education Department for about $10,000, and it took $3,500 to clean it up. City staffers have worked 412 hours on the project, according to the city. And in 2021, the city won a $250,000 grant from Lowe’s, which gave the money to the city based on an application for a homeless shelter.

Taylor, carrying a tray of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches he was handing out, said that despite the bumpy start, he was happy to get the doors open and get started.

“I’m so thankful for Michael Gilliard, the public works and housing coordinator, and Cynthia Anderson,” Taylor said. “Anytime that something has come up, they have been the ones I have been on the phone to.”

He said he is also looking for ways to operate as efficiently as possible. That means looking for money and food donations as well as using volunteers.

“I really wanted to hire a person to run the kitchen,” he said. “But students from a culinary school in Little Rock are going to handle that for now.”