The only overnight, low-barrier warming center in Fairbanks is set to open for the winter on Thursday, but the organization operating it says they need more money to get through the season.
The nonprofit HopeLink runs the warming center. It isn’t a shelter, and sobriety is also not a prerequisite for entry. That’s part of what distinguishes the center from services offered by other Fairbanks organizations, like the Rescue Mission, which runs an overnight emergency shelter – the only one in Interior Alaska – but requires people to be sober.
HopeLink Founding Board Member Savannah Fletcher said the warming center is a nightly place for people experiencing homelessness in Fairbanks to duck the Interior’s extreme wintertime cold.
“We provide snacks and a place for people to sit and get warm,” she said. “Our goal is to provide for that acute need – that people don’t need to freeze outside and that we don’t need to lose limbs or life due to the cold winters that we have.”
Fletcher said they’ve signed a second one-year lease at the former Goldie’s building downtown. That means the warming center is staying in the same location this season as last. It will be open from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. each night and is located at 659 5th Avenue.
Thursday will mark the earliest point in the season that HopeLink has started things up in the three winters it’s been operating. Last season, the organization opened the warming center in December. Inaugural operations got underway in February the winter before that in the Hannah Solomon building at the edge of downtown, near Rabinowitz Courthouse. The center moved to the new location between the first and second season for more space.
Fletcher said that, on average, 55 people came to the center per night last season, totaling about 6,200 sign-ins. She said those sign-ins represent more than a data point.
“Someone, instead of sleeping overnight outside in the cold, got to be in our warming center instead,” she said.
But continuing to staff and stock the center takes money, and HopeLink’s funding doesn’t include any contracts with the Fairbanks North Star Borough or the City of Fairbanks.
The majority of HopeLink’s revenue comes from private donors, and they currently have enough funds to sustain the center through February, according to Fletcher, who added that running it for the season costs about $250,000. She said they’ll keep fundraising through the winter and that they want to extend services through April.
“I think a lot of people expect this to be a government service – you look at cities like Anchorage where it is the municipality providing a warming center for folks – they don’t realize that we don’t have that support,” she said.
The Municipality of Anchorage ran a nighttime warming station through a contractor last year, though it isn’t opening the station again this year. But the municipality does fund multiple shelters.
Fletcher, a former FNSB Assemblymember, said direct support for HopeLink falls outside the powers of the second-class borough. The City of Fairbanks does have social services powers, and Fletcher said HopeLink will likely retry funding talks with the city under the new administration of Mayor-elect Mindy O’Neall.
O’Neall isn’t sworn-in yet. That’s scheduled for this coming Monday. She said by phone Tuesday that she’s currently going department by department to prepare a proposed budget for next fiscal year to submit to the city council by the end of October. O’Neall was non-committal, but she said greater city involvement in the warming center is a conversation she’d be open to.
“It’s a service and a need of our community. It’s definitely an issue that I heard a lot about, and I’m willing to talk to anybody who has a solution,” she said.
Outgoing Mayor David Pruhs gave a more definitive assessment. He said by phone that the city’s main involvement in the warming center thus far has been sending police to the location when there are disruptions, but that financial support is a different question.
“That is not what we are prescribed to do for the City of Fairbanks. It’s not. It’s not in our charter, it’s not in our code, it’s not in any ordinance to help Hopelink,” he said.
He said there are other organizations in town that provide services to people experiencing homelessness, and that, in his view, the city shouldn’t differentiate by picking one to fund.