Aurora’s winter warming center underwent a number of changes last year. Now, the city is taking the reins.
This year, the city will hire and pay staff directly to run the center, along with relying on volunteers. This move will cost just above $150,000, a 15% increase from last year, when the city paid Becoming Oswego church $135,000 to operate the shelter, according to Nicole Mullins, Aurora’s chief community services officer.
The increased cost for this coming winter assumes the center operates for 90 days with an average of 30 guests per day, said city officials. Staffing will include 17 temporary employees consisting of a manager, six leads and 12 aides, along with paid security and volunteers, said city officials.
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The city plans to continue operating the shelter at 712 S. River St. in Aurora from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. when temperatures are at or below 32 degrees for at least six hours.
Advocates from the group that previously ran the shelter, Becoming Oswego, said they always intended to hand control over to the city. Now, those advocates say they have more time to expand efforts in Kendall County, which has stirred some controversy, along with filling resource gaps for people living unhoused in Aurora.
“The Aurora-based warming center was born out of churches needing to come together to fill the need until Aurora could really have the time to really invest fully into it,” said Annie Fish, who was executive director of the Aurora Winter Warming Center last winter when it was operated by Becoming Oswego.
Before having Becoming Oswego operate the center last winter, Aurora contracted with Wesley United Methodist Church in Aurora, which ran the warming center the previous year.
Before contracting with Wesley, the city operated its warming center at the Aurora Transportation Center, starting in 2014.
Mullins said the city aims this year to better meet its established protocols, documentation requirements, fiscal controls, contractual boundaries and a consistent standard of accountability at the warming center in Aurora. She said meeting these standards posed challenges when contracting with nonprofits in previous years.
“When you have a people-centered organization wanting to meet the need and they see all the need … it’s not always realistic or appropriate for the city to fill all of those things,” she said. “That really was at the root of a lot of the issues.”
Mullins also said she hopes having dedicated staff at the warming center can help better distribute the workload and alleviate a sense of burnout volunteers felt in previous years, she said.
“They were heavily reliant on volunteers,” she said. “There was a significant amount of burnout from the last two contractors.”
The city hired Ruben Morales, who previously worked at the shelter with Becoming Oswego, to manage the shelter this year, after an interview process that began in early September, according to city officials.
When the shelter is open, the city plans to always have at least one manager and one shelter aide in addition to volunteers on site, said Mullins.
As for Becoming Oswego, which previously ran the Aurora shelter, advocates say they want to build on their momentum from last year and fill needs that cannot be easily met by a city-operated shelter, said Fish.
The group is looking to meet its priorities in the area in two main ways – a new nonprofit in Aurora and a new warming shelter in Boulder Hill. Fish said that both initiatives aim to continue serving the same people who relied on the Aurora warming center last winter.
The Aurora nonprofit, said Fish, is aiming to fill resource gaps for the “tent-living city population” in the Aurora area. She said the intention is to operate collaboratively with other nonprofits, churches and organizations to better coordinate resources, while also applying for grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“Everyone working in silos, that’s really, really normal in this work, and I want to change that,” Fish said. “If we want to create real solutions … there has to be collaboration.”
So far, that group has hosted a vaccine clinic for people living unhoused and is working with 10 people who used the Aurora winter warming shelter last year on finding housing, said Fish.
Fish said that overall, running the warming shelter revealed what she called a homelessness “crisis” in the area. She said that several factors are making the issue more visible locally. These include increased living costs and Hesed House homeless shelter in Aurora operating at full capacity for over a year.
Even when local organizations offer affordable housing resources, Fish said, people living unhoused often do not qualify for them.
“There’s still not enough shelter vacancies available in our communities,” said Fish. “Not enough is being done, and it’s becoming more visible, and we want to deal with this safely and responsibly.”
Fish said she saw a lot of that need in Kendall County, as around 15 people from the county consistently relied on the Aurora warming center last year. Part of the issue, said Fish, is a general lack of resources in that area.
“There’s automatically a need for us to get started and going in Kendall County,” Fish said.
Becoming Oswego church, which is located in Kendall County, was already gearing up to focus more on its own area when its contract to operate the Aurora warming center ended this summer, said Fish.
But the church’s plans to open Oswegoland Community House (OCH), a nonprofit warming shelter for Kendall County’s unhoused residents, this winter have been met with opposition.
Over 350 people attended a recent meeting about the proposed shelter at the church where the center would be located – Neighborhood Church of the Brethren at 155 Boulder Hill Pass in Montgomery.
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At the meeting, some residents said they opposed the center’s proposed location in a residential neighborhood, close to Boulder Hill Elementary School and a senior living community. Opponents also say they feel they have had no input on the warming center plan.
A petition against the proposed center also garnered over 500 signatures.
Fish said advocates and stakeholders have continued to meet and are considering a different location due to the feedback, but she said advocates would like to have one consistent location for the warming shelter in Kendall County this winter.
Aurora Ald. Will White, at large, spoke at the recent meeting at Neighborhood Church of the Brethren in support of the proposed Kendall County center and asked more area officials to get involved.
“You’ve got to have the people who are running this community here at the table in discussion with you all,” White said. “How we can reduce the number of people who live on the street …that’s really what we’re trying to do.”