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A newly built homeless shelter in Rockville means more than just new walls and furnishings to its residents and staff.
"It is beautiful and I'm just waiting to see what great things we can do and achieve here," Clark Riche said as he took a break from moving boxes into the new facility at 600 East Gude Drive Friday afternoon.
The 47-year-old Germantown resident said he volunteers often at the Chase Partnership House, a transitional shelter for 36 men and one of the programs the building will serve, and for good reason — he graduated from the program just a few months ago and now runs his own business.
The pinwheel-shaped house took about seven months to build and replaces a renovated industrial garage. It now features two dining rooms, two life skills kitchens, two computer labs, laundry and bathroom facilities, bedrooms, conference rooms and lounges.
The shelter will serve the residents of Chase Partnership House, which is run by Community Ministries of Rockville, and Adrianne's Safe Havens, which provides transitional housing and services to 15 mentally ill homeless men. It also includes a third separate office wing for Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless staff, which is in charge of Adrianne's Safe Havens and the neighboring Men's Emergency Shelter.
The Men's Emergency Shelter also got a makeover, which has given staff and residents more space for programs and sleeping.
The new facilities cost approximately $6.4 million to build. The funding came from a variety of public and private sources.
As she watched Riche and several other men bring boxes and crates through the front hall, Agnes Saenz, executive director of Community Ministries of Rockville, said she hopes the new 14,250-square-foot facility will make residents feel comfortable.
"It's not only a new building, it's a new home for the guys," she said. "It's a big change and it's a beautiful, beautiful place."
Saenz toured the building along with Catherine Leggett, wife of County Executive Isiah Leggett (D); Chuck Short, special assistant to the county executive; Jim Booker, director of Chase Partnership House, and Sarah Mahin, director of development and communications for the Coalition for the Homeless.
Short, who served as director of the county's Department of Health and Human Services when the original building opened, said the new facility is a vast improvement over the garage that had housed the two programs since the mid-1980s. The former building had oil stains on the floor, few windows and thin walls, he said.
"What this home will do is it will help us so that when someone walks through the door here, the first message they get is that they're a valuable, respected individual whom we believe in and we expect has the capacity to make themselves better again," Short said as he toured one of the bedrooms. "And I think that's an entirely different message than we used to send [with the old building]."
Chase Partnership House residents moved in over the weekend while Adrianne's Safe Havens residents and Coalition for the Homeless staff are slated to come next week. The 51 men served by Chase Partnership House and the Safe Havens program stayed in hotels while the facility was being built.
The men who stay at the emergency shelter were able to remain in place as work continued on the 3,780-square-foot addition.
That building, which was originally built in 2000 at 5,800 square feet, now features a laundry room, bathroom and shower facilities, two medical examination rooms, offices for counselors and a meeting room.
Darrell Butler, director of the Men's Emergency Shelter, said the building, which used to be one large room, had only been able to serve 100 men and an additional 35 had to sleep in a trailer.
"Now those 35 guys are afforded a bunk bed because of the addition," he said. "Also, because of the addition we now have on-site medical exam rooms where they can address any acute illnesses. The work environment is better and more conducive to confidentiality because now the case managers have offices in the addition, and we now have a multipurpose room that's going to be used for so many things."
Butler said the addition was completed at the end of January.
As he sat sketching at one of the tables in the new room, Jorge Vasquez, who has been staying at the shelter for about four months, said the addition has improved life at the shelter.
"It's better for us because we have more space," he said. "It's much nicer."
The organizations and companies that contributed money, materials or labor to the shelter projects include Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless, Community Ministries of Rockville, Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services, Montgomery County Department of Housing and Community Affairs, Home Builders Care Foundation, Winchester Homes, Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County, Forrester Construction Company, JSA Inc. Architects and Planners, Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The facilities cost approximately $6.4 million to build.
