Journey Home Friends,
We are thrilled to announce that after testing over 150 clients and staff for COVID-19 at one of the area hotels, not a single person tested positive. We offer tremendous thanks to the City of Hartford, Hartford Healthcare, South Park Inn, and Community Renewal Team for helping to make this possible. This testing was the largest comprehensive test of the homeless population in any region of our state and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results. Our collective efforts of moving this very vulnerable population out of congregate shelters and into hotels to ensure physical distancing has certainly succeeded. We will continue to work at the intersection of health and homelessness to help individuals and families find a safe, stable, and affordable home.
This week, again with the support of the City of Hartford, Hartford Healthcare, ImmaCare, South Park Inn, and Community Renewal Team, we were able to test almost 60 additional clients at another area hotel. As we await those results, we continue to hope for the best.
In addition to our focus on testing, we have also been working with leaders from across the state to plan a major effort to house 1000 households statewide in the next few months. We anticipate that hotels will not be able to extend contracts to host people experiencing homelessness for too much longer, and we also recognize that we cannot go back to compressed shelters with no end in sight for COVID-19. Therefore, we will face these challenges head-on and will focus our efforts on housing as many people experiencing homelessness as possible in as short amount of time as possible. It will take an enormous amount of collaboration, partnership, and creativity to achieve this goal, but we believe that is possible with all of us working together, and we trust that you, our friends and supporters, donors, landlords, public officials, philanthropists, and caring individuals will support us through this effort.
As part of our update, we always take a moment to recognize our partners who deserve thanks for the work that they have been doing or the support they have provided to Journey Home:
- Thank you to United Way of Central and Northeast Connecticut for a $20,000 grant
- Thank you to Idlewilde Printing, Keating Agency Insurance and a West Hartford-based Facebook group for their donation of $1,174 — the proceeds from a t-shirt fundraiser for Journey Home
- Thank you to all of our friends and supporters who have donated money or supplies.
As usual, there are many others who have helped in so many ways, and we apologize for not naming them all here, but will do our best to acknowledge them as soon as we can.
With deep gratitude,
Matt and the Journey Home team