NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. (LEX 18) — Jessamine County Homeless Coalition serves hot meals to people in Nicholasville every day. They've been in the community for eight years.
April McCubbins started coming to the shelter in 2017, when she was homeless in Lexington for three years. Now, she's this shelter's operations director. She says this place gave her a second chance.
She says, "It gave me a safe place to sleep every night, a safe place to keep the few belongings that I and an opportunity to change the way I was living."
McCubbins has seen the shelter give a lot of people that opportunity. Now, this shelter's leaders are fighting to keep it going.
Executive director Johnny Templin says, "It offers two main programs -- one's an emergency stay, and the other is a 90-day case management program."
Templin says they offer a lot. "We also offer laundry, meals, and showers to the community as needed."
Although they operate mostly off what the community gives them, it still costs around $6,000 to keep things running every month. A while back, they hoped to expand on Broadway Street, but after the purchase, they learned the space was contaminated and couldn't have anything built.
Templin says, "We did our best and what that looked like was we incurred some debt."
Without funding, they have about six weeks before they'll have to shut down. They were the only emergency shelter in the county before unhoused people relied on Lexington’s resources. Without them, options are limited.
"People would be sleeping in church stoops and under back doors of business docks and sometimes in unsafe environments for both the property owner, the manager, and the person,” says Templin.
McCubbin explains why having a safe space is so important. "At night when everybody is at home safe in their beds a lot of homeless people are out walking around trying to stay awake so that they don't get taken advantage of or end up in jail."
Donations can help save this place. McCubbin says the shelter lets people be a part of the community again. She says everyone should have something like that.
She says, "People need to be where they can work toward becoming productive members of their community and having a place like that allows that to happen."
To learn more about the shelter and how to donate, visit www.JCHCKY.org.
