The Bethesda Center for the Homeless is planning to return to normal daytime hours of operation during the week after having been closed during the day for more than two weeks. Next week Bethesda will be open during the day from 8 a.m.
to 2 p.m. on weekdays, but will still be closed from 8 a.
m. to 5 p.m.
on the weekends because of funding challenges, according to Bethesda’s executive director Chris Leab. The earlier decision to close during the week has led to the loss of shelter for Bethesda’s residents throughout the day, leaving many people experiencing homelessness to line up along the sidewalk along Patterson Avenue. Residents shouldn’t be out on the streets, Leab said, because some have cancer or other medical conditions that require care.
Bethesda is Winston-Salem’s only low-barrier shelter, meaning that the shelter takes in both individual men and women who are experiencing homelessness, and provides them with space even if they have a criminal record, mental illness or a drug addiction. There is also no other shelter in the city that offers as many hours of operation as the Bethesda Center. People are also reading.
.. Chad Armstrong, the chair of Bethesda’s board of directors since May 2023, said that closing during the day was a financial decision to maintain care for the people Bethesda serves.
The organization is in such a precarious financial situation that it had to cut daytime hours for the administration of the shelter instead of a potential decision to close the entire operation, Armstrong said. The solution, which has allowed Bethesda to open the day shelter during the week again, was organizational restructuring and changing the responsibilities, roles and titles of staff members at Bethesda. Some of those changes Armstrong said he is not at liberty to discuss because they are still changing them.
“The day shelter was never closed in perpetuity,” Armstrong said. “It was closed until a solution could be found. We’re doing this so we can bring it back in a better model.
” A recent $70,000 intervention from the city of Winston-Salem has also helped Bethesda continue to operate. Armstrong said the city has been an “incredibly gracious partner” to Bethesda and described how the city has worked to provide unrestricted funds to help more than just Bethesda’s case workers, which are funded by restricted grants. Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines said that the city had already approved a number of grants for the Bethesda Center, and City Manager Patrick Pate was able to move the grant money to the organization ahead of time to help with operational costs.
Bethesda’s cash flow was so bad that the organization wasn’t able to make any new expenditures, Joines said. “Bethesda provides a tremendous service to our homeless community,” Joines said. “As the weather starts to get colder it will become more and more critical we find a way to help them stay open.
” Bethesda’s tax filings show that the organization’s net assets have fallen from approximately $1.6 million in 2021 to a position of about $1.2 million in 2023.
Leab told the Journal earlier that former executive director Derwin Montgomery’s embezzling of $26,299 from the shelter had been a factor in a negative perception of Bethesda. A 15-count indictment of Montgomery said that he charged the shelter for a trip to Cancun, Mexico, stays at luxury hotels, expenses at a strip club, and a lease for a car. But the idea that the loss of money from Bethesda was mostly because of Montgomery is a misconception, Armstrong said.
“When Derwin left Bethesda there was $1.6 million on the table,” Armstrong said. “We were in a drastically better situation, Derwin left us in a much better situation.
” In those days, Bethesda had multiple full-time positions such as an accountant, an assistant executive director, and a grant writer. But over the course of the years after Montgomery left Bethesda, some of those staff members left or were terminated. Other board chairs made the decision to restructure those positions in the organization, Armstrong said.
“I don’t think there are regrets,” Armstrong said. “I respectfully don’t want to disparage them or speak on their leadership.” The shelter’s current director Keshia Gonzalez, who joined Bethesda in 2020, told the Journal that the high staff turnover threw off Bethesda’s ongoing process of searching and applying for funding and grant money.
There were many applications and searches that were left unfinished, Gonzalez said. On Saturday, about 10 residents of Bethesda were left to gather under the shade of a tree on the edge of the Crisis Control Ministry building next to the Bethesda Center, which was closed. Many of those residents confirmed that two people had to be carried away by emergency services after severe dehydration and overheating.
They also discussed seeing several churches visit Bethesda to bring by financial checks. Those were moments that made them angry and confused. Why had they been left in the heat with no shelter when so much money was coming in? “It’d be one thing if the people who made these administrative decisions sat out here for hours with us, but they’re not,” Nikko Leroy said.
“How can you possibly understand what we’re going through?” Shameka O’Neal, who has a job working at Chili’s, said that she and others who had jobs were left with no shelter during their days off. Another woman who didn’t wish to be identified said that she had been staying at Bethesda for about five or six weeks. She shared that many of the people staying out near the Bethesda building while it was closed in the day have health issues.
“It’s hard being out in the sun when you can’t breathe good,” she said. “We need to stick together because it’s not a good neighborhood.” Under the shade of the lone tree, people lay on picnic blankets and threw a jacket over their heads to protect from the sun.
Some sat with their legs over a memorial plaque for May Boney Kinlaw, a former director for Crisis Control Ministry. “These are hardworking people who just ran into financial situations beyond their means,” Leroy said, waving his hand at the group under the tree and those assembled in the shade of the Crisis Control building. “When you’re going through it, it doesn’t matter.
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