Room in the Inn
Father Charles Strobel, Director
606 Demonbreun St.
Nashville, Tenn. 37219
(615) 254-7666

Father Charlie Strobel, an inner-city parish priest, recalls how his parish ministry led him first to feeding homeless people and then to housing them: During the cold winter of 1986 he noticed families spending the night in cars in the church parking lot, turning the engines on and off during the night to run the heaters, then coming to the rectory door in the morning and asking for money for gasoline.

Unable to sleep at night while these people were suffering, he decided to open the church cafeteria as a shelter; and with the help of church volunteers, it stayed open from Thanksgiving time through Easter.

During the following summer, he came up with the great idea that eventually grew into Room in the Inn: He asked several neighboring churches to band together, each agreeing to open room to shelter homeless people, and to provide volunteers, one night of the week. Through this process, the burden could be shared evenly, providing the service without placing an impossible workload on any one institution. The number of participating churches grew from five to 31 the first winter, and increased each year thereafter until now 126 Nashville-area churches and synagogues are participating. Room in the Inn, working out of a large old warehouse building near downtown, serves as the intake point and clearing house for the winter (Nov. 1-March 31) shelter program, which last winter provided shelter for 174 homeless people on an average night and 2,313 unduplicated individuals through the season.

It works like this: Each day, the 12 to 14 churches offering shelter that night are listed on a large board; most churches are asked to provide shelter one night a week. As homeless people report to Room in the Inn for shelter, they are entered into the computer system, which assigns them to one of the churches at random. Each church provides transportation, a hot evening meal and breakfast, and a warm, safe place to sleep. Because the churches bear the nominal costs, Room in the Inn gets along with a staff of two and an annual budget of about $60,000.

While the homeless people wait for their ride to the night's shelter, they can wait at Room in the Inn (which has warm space indoors for 40 but only a wind-sheltered waiting area outside for overflow; they're trying to raise $20,000 to weatherize the outdoor area), watch television, get a snack and take showers in a supervised bath area.

Room in the Inn has also started and spun off several other good programs: Matthew 25, which is a single-room-occupancy transitional-housing complex for homeless men with jobs; and Crossroads, an effort to select groups of 12 homeless men for an intense three-month program of structured counseling and training, ranging from drug and alcohol counseling to stress management, budgeting and job-seeking skills.

Strobel is particularly excited about Room in the Inn's latest program, The Guest House, an alternative program for street drunks. Started as a pilot program last June at the request of the Metropolitan Court System, The Guest House was supposed to run for one month, but it was such a success that Strobel has continued it, even though he can't figure out how to finance it.

It is essentially an alternative to incarceration. When Metro police pick up a homeless drunk over 18, man or woman, they may elect to deliver him to The Guest House instead of the city jail's drunk tank. Run by volunteers and by the residents themselves, it's not a treatment or rehab center (which require special licensing and medical staff) but simply a safe, clean place where drunks can sober up in a supportive atmosphere and, having done so, begin participating in a structured daily-life environment with AA and drug-and-alcohol counseling available. Living communally in a former Salvation Army building next door to Room in the Inn, the group of 12 or more boasts several residents who have been sober for several months, and it is already starting to turn success stories -- sober, employed men -- out onto the streets.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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