New initiative aims to change conversation about unsheltered people in Brunswick

Caption

The Well is a Christian day shelter for Brunswick’s homeless. It recently reopened with increased safety measures but is being sued by the city, which alleges it is a public nuisance.

Credit: Justin Taylor / The Current

A new initiative aims to bring more funding, accountability and focus to help prevent homelessness in southeastern Georgia’s Brunswick.

The initiative is called Under One Roof, a fund of the Communities of Coastal Georgia Foundation, a large grant-making nonprofit in Glynn County.

Its leaders hope to start a new conversation about unsheltered people.

“When most of us talk about the challenges that are being faced in our communities, day services and chronic homelessness are very important issues,” said Alan Akridge, one of the group’s founders and the senior pastor at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Brunswick, “But they’re also quite divisive.”

Public discord over Brunswick’s unsheltered population simmered over in 2023, when conversations centered around a day shelter called The Well.

City officials filed a federal lawsuit to try to shut the shelter down, citing misleading crime data and calling it a “public nuisance.”

“We understood from the beginning that there was a separate population of people whose problem is acute homelessness,” said Akridge. “It’s temporary. And what they really need is this hand up. And that tended to be an area that resonated no matter who you are in any community.”

The idea for Under One Roof started to coalesce around the time that The Well was drawing the public’s attention, he said.

Since then, the initiative has brought together several local programs for the unhoused together (as its name implies) with a narrow focus on three project areas, the first two of which already existed:

• Veteran’s Village, a residential complex of 29 “tiny homes;”
• Saved by Grace, a men’s residential work program; and,
• A yet-unnamed program to provide transitional housing for 60 women and children.

The Well and Hand in Hand of Glynn, which operates a 60-unit complex offering permanent housing for the unhoused, are not part of the initiative.

“But there isn't anything saying that we couldn't collaborate with them later,” said Don Myers, a fundraising and development professional who’s part of Under One Roof’s leadership team.

The initiative already has secured a $5 million pledge from the Anschutz Foundation, a Colorado-based philanthropy, and the support of Sea Island Company, of one of the area’s largest employers.

The company’s CEO, Scott Steilen, says large donors are key to Under One Roof’s initial fundraising goal of $10 million to address housing insecurity.

“One of the things that we thought is very critical to our success is to be fairly narrow in focus and extraordinarily accountable in what we do so that we create the momentum that allows for that platform to grow,” Steilen said. “If we’re able to get to these folks [the acutely homeless] early and sooner, we can ultimately prevent that chronic population from growing.”

There were 123 unsheltered people in Glynn County on Jan. 22, 2024, the date of the most recent “Point in Time” count, a nationwide survey, according to Jeff Clark, street outreach program director for Safe Shelter.

Under One Roof presented plans about its initiatives to Glynn County commissioners in August.