Building our homeless shelter has been an exciting adventure. I live in Placer County, California, which has a population of 375,000. The county spans from the City of Roseville, a suburb of Sacramento; to the shores of Lake Tahoe - with lots of forested mountains in between. The nearest town to me is the county seat, Auburn, with a population of about 20,000.

Back in about 2004, Placer County authorities got caught transporting local homeless people to volunteer facilities in the neighboring county of Sacramento, and a court order was issued to stop that practice. Soon after, churches in Placer County established the Gathering Inn, which provided floor space for homeless people to sleep - in a different church every night. The Gathering Inn is centered in Roseville. Homeless people in Auburn, 16 miles away, had to board a bus at 3 PM every day to get to the Gathering Inn processing center. The 250-some homeless people in Auburn didn't make use of the Gathering Inn very much, because it was so much easier to camp in open spaces around Auburn. But those open spaces eventually closed up, and that left a good number of homeless people wandering the neighborhoods of Auburn. Auburn is a very conservative community in a very conservative county, and people started to demand stricter enforcement and stricter laws to bring the homeless population under control.

The next county north of us is Nevada County, which is a liberal enclave in usually-conservative Northern California. And Nevada County had folksinger U.Utah Phillips. Utah and his wife and friends founded Hospitality House in 2005, and it has become an exemplary homeless shelter that now houses 54 people. And my stingy county had a round-robin shelter that housed 40-60 people on the floors of church halls. And many citizens were up in arms, insisting that our homeless people came from elsewhere and should be shipped out of town. They objected to establishment of a shelter, because a shelter might serve as a "magnet" to bring in more homeless people.

Back in 2011, I joined with three women to study the county jail in Auburn, to try to find a way to end the jail's practice of releasing inmates at night when their time was served - releasing them with no resources, no transportation, and no place to go. We soon learned that many of the jail inmates were homeless people with mental health problems or addictions, so we joined forces with other people and established the Auburn Area Homeless Forum. We began a campaign of letters to the editor and comments in social media, and we sent representatives to every public meeting that had anything to do with homelessness. After the Homeless Forum got its start, a local Catholic priest started a group called Right Hand Auburn. Most of the Right Hand Auburn people are wealthy and conservative, while we in the Homeless Forum are mostly unreconstructed hippies. Right Hand Auburn launched a plan to open a homeless shelter in the recently-vacated minimum security section of the County Jail, two brick buildings that had been army barracks during World War II. The Homeless Forum and other organizations joined forces with Right Hand Auburn, and we were able to open a shelter with 47 beds in June, 2015 - but the county allowed us to operate only from 5 PM to 7 AM. In less than a year, we were allowed to operate a 24-hr shelter for 50 people, and "emergency" space on the floor for another 50 people at night. Now the shelter operates 24/7 and serves 100 residents. It provides mental health and addiction treatment, job training, housing referral, and classes that teach residents how to be good rental tenants.

The shelter was originally supported by donations with a contribution from the county. Soon after the shelter opened, the county started paying for everything but meals - meals are provided by churches and other volunteer organizations.

But the shelter isn't everything. Our community organizing efforts had an amazing effect on the county government. We have two strong supporters on the 5-member County Board of Supervisors, and we're usually able to coax a third or fourth vote on matters that concern us*. And we found that there were talented employees in county government who were just waiting for permission from the public to step forward and do good things for those in need in the community. The Sheriff joined with the Probation Department and County Mental Health to form a homeless task force that serves and patrols the homeless community. The Probation Department started a very successful job training program for jail releasees. The Sisters of Mercy built a beautiful apartment complex for formerly homeless senior citizens, and the county launched a number of efforts to build housing for the poor.

I'm now the outgoing president of an organization called Placer People of Faith Together. We do community organizing on the issues of incarceration, homelessness, and immigration. We try to attend every public meeting that has anything to do with these issues, and we speak out in public meetings and in local news media. We insist on a non-adversarial approach, and that has served us well. In the process, we have made friends and built ourselves a good reputation in the community and an excellent relationship with local government.

And it has been fun. And the taxpayers are paying most of the expenses.

-Joe-

*I'm friends with the one county supervisor who consistently votes against us, and he has often done very generous things that have helped us out in many ways.