The Rev. Pat Fish is no novice when it comes to sheltering those who are homeless.
He is the pastor of Becoming Oswego, a church that was contracted to run Aurora’s warming center last winter after helping Wesley United Methodist take the lead on that mission the previous year.
Fish is also no stranger to challenges. He knew opening Oswegoland Community House (OCH), a nonprofit warming shelter for Kendall County’s unhoused residents, this winter might run into opposition. Fish was not prepared, however, for the pushback he and other OCH members faced at a question-and-answer session Sept. 25 in the church where the warming center would be located.
An estimated 350 people filled Neighborhood Church of the Brethren at 155 Boulder Hill Pass in Montgomery, including those who came in support and those with genuine questions they wanted answered.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, the loudest voices took over the meeting. The crowd turned loud, rude, mocking and at times down-right ugly – often drowning out speakers as they tried to explain how the center would be run and why there was such a need.
After the meeting was over, Fish told me, a man even spit out the pastor’s home address and then warned him, “I’m coming for your family.”
I didn’t hear any alleged threats or racial slurs from the crowd when I watched the long video link of the meeting that was posted on the OCH Facebook page. But there’s no question this gathering about a local warming shelter was another disturbing reminder of how badly we’ve lost the ability to listen, disagree and still treat one another with basic respect.
“It was,” said Fish, “a sad day for the neighborhood.”
Lisa Cook, who started an opposition petition to the warming center that garnered over 500 signatures, agreed the meeting was not the community’s best moment.
“It got heated,” said the 22-year resident of Boulder Hill. “It has created chaos in the neighborhood and nobody wants that.”
Indeed, even those opposed to the shelter recognized the hatred in the room when they got a chance to speak, with one woman feeling so much tension when she stepped into the room that “you could cut it with a knife.”
Another disagreed, however, describing the emotions not as hate but as “frustration” because residents feel they had no input into this plan for a warming center.
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And more than a few are taking issue with being painted as unsympathetic to the mission when in fact, “the program is not the problem,” said one opponent. “It is not being heard.”
What opponents are saying – in some instances, screaming – is that a warming shelter for the homeless does not belong in a residential area and certainly not right next to Boulder Hill Elementary School.
“This has nothing to do with being a Christian or not wanting to help the homeless,” said Cook, who said she attends church every Sunday and has worked with DuPage PADS.
“It all comes down to location.”
That message has come through loud and clear on social media, and certainly at this meeting, where speakers not only expressed concerns about safety but about being the last to know of plans for the shelter.
Fortunately, while things got pretty heated, there was no need for intervention from the Kendall County Sheriff’s Department that was on hand, said Undersheriff Bobby Richardson, who had met with OCH on Aug. 24 when the group presented its mission to his department and representatives from other local stakeholders.
Those included Rush Copley Medical Center, Oswego fire and police, Kendall County Health Department, Kendall County Board, Oswego Township, the villages of Oswego and Montgomery and Oswego School District 308 – all of which have little or no authority over the shelter beyond enforcing applicable building, fire and safety codes because it is housed in a church.
There are still hoops OCH has to go through, Kendall County Board member Dan Koukol told the audience, also noting he’s received 97 calls about the shelter, and that, “if this was a vote on the Kendall County Board, I’d probably vote no.”
Likewise, when I spoke with Kendall County Sheriff Dwight Baird later, he too expressed reservations about the current site and the way it was presented to the community. Everyone, he said, should have been more involved in the process from the beginning.
The problem, the sheriff also said, is that winter is coming fast.
That makes finding a solution more urgent, especially in Kendall County, which closed down its PADS program in 2020 because of COVID-19 related issues. And the need to find answers has only grown after the city of Aurora took back full responsibility for its warming shelter this season, making it clear the program would be for only Aurora residents.
That decision literally left Kendall’s homeless population out in the cold. But who better to fill that gap, insisted Fish, than a volunteer group made up of local nonprofit community leaders who have worked directly with this vulnerable population and know them better than anyone.
The shelter, which follows the PADS model, would be open when the temperature drops below 32 degrees, with guests transported in at 8 p.m. and taken out at 6 a.m. to designated locations, where they would receive resources from other nonprofit partners in the community, said Fish.
According to former PADS Kendall County Executive Director Anne Engelhardt, for 10 years her organization was spread out among seven faith-based sites – each took a day of the week – including multiple churches in residential areas and/or with schools in the buildings.
The guests, she said, did not hang around the sites because there were no warming shelters nearby and “they found places to go during the day” to get out of the cold.
Unfortunately, what’s clear at this point is trust has been broken. And Fish admits things should have been handled differently.
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OCH is meeting with community stakeholders again this week, he said, and is planning smaller roundtable discussions that would be led by a “third party objective person.”
The hope is that a solution can be found, even if it means postponing the Nov. 1 startup. The way it stands now, OCH is not going ahead with a planned fall fundraiser because of the “amount of hate” witnessed at that meeting in the church, Fish told me.
Members of the church and his group were “shellshocked” at what they witnessed, he said, and putting donors at risk would be “irresponsible.”
That being said, the need has not changed, nor has OCH’s resolve to address it.
“Unfortunately, everything these days seems to be so political,” Fish said. “It makes serving our neighbors that much harder.”