How to Help a Homeless Shelter

While homeless shelters in large cities are all about helping homeless people, the shelters themselves are always in need of help. For these institutions to continue operating, they must have continuous support from various sources. There are a variety of ways almost anyone can help.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

How to Help a Homeless Shelter

1. Offer, under the auspices of your church or club or other organization, to provide one meal a month. This means planning a menu, buying the groceries, cooking the meal, serving it to the residents, and cleaning up. Someone like a volunteer coordinator will work out the details with your group.

2. Offer to help with maintenance and repairs. Get your friends together to spend a weekend repainting a day room in a shelter or scrubbing and waxing all the floors. Custodians at shelters are almost always overworked, and some things just don’t get proper attention.

3. Offer to tutor (or find people to tutor) students of all ages. Many shelters provide housing for homeless families. Because of the transient nature of most of their lives, many children in these families are behind in school—no matter how smart they are. You might be teaching kindergartners the letters of the alphabet or helping 10th graders with algebra.

4. Hold a holiday party for children at the shelter. Bake cookies for Valentine’s Day, for example, and help children make valentines for friends and members of their family.

5. Provide birthday celebrations for residents. Bakeries or bakery departments of grocery stores will often be willing to donate one sheet cake a month. Celebrate all the birthdays in January, for example, by bringing in a cake and some ice cream, showing a special video, playing some games and giving small gifts to the children.

6. Collect clothing and shoes that can be used for residents of a shelter looking for work. Often it is difficult for social workers to help homeless people look for jobs because they do not have appropriate clothes—either for interviewing or the job itself.

7. Start a fund drive at your place of work. Put up posters detailing the services the shelter provides and ask everyone to decide on one service they would like to help support. For example, a group might decide that they want to raise money for bedding in a shelter that provides emergency overnight housing for teenager runaways.

8. Find out what federal, state, and city contributions are given to the shelter and talk to your government representatives about any unmet needs. Find other people willing to write or e-mail in support of the shelter’s needs.

9. Try to help arrange business partners for the shelter who will work with the director to help support the shelter’s programs and to provide business advice.