Until late 2022, there were no cold shelter programs in Carroll County.
“The need in our county went completely undocumented[,] unresearched and unaddressed,” said Gail Doktor, vice president and the co-founder of the Way Station in Conway.
Doktor says for several years, resources were scarce to provide this kind of support for unhoused people in the county. Doktor said prior to 2020, there were also no organizations reporting for the federal government’s annual point-in-time count, which measures how many people are sheltered or not on one day across the country.
But now, through funds provided by the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, the Way Station provides emergency shelter access, kits and gas cards during cold fronts, winter storms and particularly inclement weather. Last year, the organization served 31 householdsthrough this program.
Borrowing the idea from other emergency shelter programs across the state, Way Station books hotel rooms at reduced rates that they can place people when conditions call for it. Oftentimes, winter storms and cold nights mean there are some vacancies.
“We have had back to back storms where either there was enough snow accumulation or the temperatures were down in the single digits overnight, that we've had to put people in hotels for a couple weeks in a row. And that means that's a ton of bed nights, right?” Doktor said. “But how many more of those bed nights will we need? We're just entering February. It's not going to get warmer.”
Already, Way Station has used more than half the beds purchased for this year.
They also provide gas cards for those unable to stay in hotel rooms or other shelters. Doktor said people turn to the Way Station for phone and laundry cards.
They’re technically open two days a week, but running the emergency winter shelter program involves a lot of hours, contacts, checking incoming storm and weather systems and making the call of whether or not they’ll activate cold shelter nights.
Doktor said the program is low to no barrier, meaning they provide beds to everyone. It also means they cannot obtain the backgrounds of everyone they are serving so they can’t ask people to share rooms for safety.
“It would be incredibly irresponsible to put people whose backgrounds we don't know in the same space together, but we are serving everybody,” she said. “So putting people in hotels is one way of doing that. It's a good use of the facilities that we do have up here.”
