Hannah France: So, Shawn, tell me what City Care has been able to accomplish with the homeless population in Oklahoma City.
Shawn Lloyd: We’ve provided just under 200,000 nights of rest during the time since 2021, since we opened our shelter. We’ve also seen just over 5,500 individuals or unique guests during that time as well.
HF: Why did City Care choose to take on the operation of the downtown Norman Shelter?
SL: We initially spoke about consulting with them to help to line up someone else who's local to Norman. When we found out how willing the City of Norman was to invest in shelter and how willing they were to reach out and start seeking people to continue to operate their shelter, it was quite inspiring, you know. And so, if we can work with a city who's willing to invest upfront in that shelter system, then I mean, it really came down to how could we say no?
HF: You're talking about investments that the city is willing to make. Can you tell me more about what those investments are?
SL: They're making changes to the space for us for what we feel like we need to provide the most amount of dignity to our guests. It's hard because the spot that's the shelter, nobody got to design as a shelter. I mean, it's literally an office building. And we’re building the community space in the middle of the building to where there's TVs and there's chairs and there's kind of more of a common area for people to gather and hang out, you know, where we can serve the meals or hand out food and hopefully get people more in a in a space where they have area to move around and live other than just go into their bunk area.
HF: So apart from the changes to the building that are being made, what will be different about City Care's operation of the shelter?
SL: We were able to retain a few employees from the previous manager. We held a group interview and it had a fairly decent turnout of people who were interested in staying on or at least wanted to come hear us out about what we were offering. So we have a mix right now of employees who were previously there and some people who have worked for City Care for years have transitioned over into that system. And there's some new people as well. There are some security stuff that the City was quite adamant about having. And so we did negotiate and add some security features that the city wanted.
HF: And what are those security features?
SL: That would be, you know, checking to make sure that people aren't bringing in knives or weapons into the building. And so, we have a walk-through metal detector. We have some wands as well. And sometimes we might use either or or one or the other. It just just depends on how cold it is outside and what's the fastest route to get people in safely, right? Because that's our main focus is to get people in and to do it as safely as we possibly can.
HF: Are those same security features implemented at the Oklahoma City Shelter that City Care runs?
SL: Absolutely, yes. It's really kind of a carbon copy of what we run in Oklahoma City. It's just in a different building, in a different city.
HF: I know there was a transitional period from the beginning of the year until the 15th where City Care was taking over operation from Food and Shelter, how did the transition process go?
SL: So far the transition has gone fairly smooth. I think most of the hardship is just kind of assuring our guest population and making sure they know that we're not walking in here with these crazy amounts of rules or these unrealistic expectations. Because the truth is, we manage low barrier shelters. So it's going to remain a low barrier shelter. Transition is hard. It takes time. But our hope is that we start helping people step into housing as soon as possible.
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