Shelter Seeks Female Donors

Fundraisers are hoping women will provide the final dollars needed to begin the long-awaited $5.5 million expansion of Howard County's only homeless shelter this fall.

Organizers for Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center Inc. this week announced an initiative to seek $1,000 pledges over three years from local women to help raise the $260,000 needed to complete the campaign launched last October. Overall, they have been trying to raise $2.4 million in private money, with government funding providing the remainder, said Lynne Nemeth, director of the campaign.

The nonprofit Grassroots, which offers shelter beds, counseling and hotline services and staffs a mobile crisis team, is enlarging its roughly 9,000-square-foot facility on Freetown Road near Atholton High School to 24,000 square feet. The number of beds will increase from 32 to 55 at the center, which last was expanded in 1989.

"Women are demonstrating they've got economic power and are now in a position to make changes because of income they've earned and investments they've made," said Mary Ann Scully, co-chair of the campaign and president and CEO of Howard Bank. "We've seen women do it over and over again."

Several of the key people behind the latest outreach helped create the philanthropic Women's Giving Circle of Howard County several years ago, and that experience convinced them that women should be a target audience for the Grassroots campaign.

"Homelessness disproportionately affects women and children," Nemeth said.

Nemeth hopes the initiative will produce more donors quickly.

"We're really pushing hard right now to finish it up," Nemeth said. "The cost of construction keeps going up." A year ago, the expansion's estimated cost was $4.5 million, but volatility in the construction industry and jumps in fuel costs have driven up the price, she said.

Andrea Ingram, Grassroots' executive director, said the center still is looking for temporary quarters during construction, now scheduled to begin in October. Synthesis Inc. of Columbia has been selected as project manager for the year-long project.

Fundraising began after the county government agreed last year to pay $1.5 million toward the project. So far, more than 100 donors, including individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, congregations and developers, have contributed.

In addition, the Grassroots project is likely to receive a $1 million grant from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, Nemeth said.

The support for Grassroots today differs sharply from the situation five years ago, when angry residents turned out at standing-room-only meetings to protest Grassroots' plans to expand and relocate with two other nonprofit organizations. Grassroots subsequently scaled back its plans. But three years ago, it launched a cold weather shelter program that has drawn an estimated 3,000 volunteers to help feed, clothe and house homeless people overnight in houses of worship.

"It turned out to be a community education project," Ingram said. "I really think it was the turning point and generated support for what we do."