Meals with Dignity for Unsheltered in Houston

We continue to work on meaningfully engaging with the people in our community who are looking for assistance relating to homelessness and food insecurity. The extreme heat of our Texas summer weather has brought a slight increase in the number of people we serve. We are seeing about 25 people come out for the monthly event for meals, showers, and haircuts. About 15-20 of them are regulars.

We do have an obstacle that we encounter during the summer because of our youth program. Our building is a community center, so all of the programs share space. During the summer, the children are in the building from 7am -6pm. Our space for the Community LUV program is restricted to one area and we have to shorten the service hours from 9am -2pm to 10am -12pm. We have still been able to provide the same services except for the distribution of clothing. We don’t have enough space to keep a lot of clothing in store during the summer. We were still able to provide clothes for people using the showers but there was not a wide selection. Clothing storage continues to be a challenge even outside of the summer months.

The main impact of decreased hours and space during the summer is potentially making our community members feel that they are not as important to us, and potentially making our staff feel overwhelmed by serving 2 high-energy programs during the same timeframe. While we are still working out the logistics, we did improve over last year by keeping the program going in this summer instead of suspending it like we did last year. We celebrate the improvement!