The Colby Echo on Homelessness and the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter

Nov 2. Capital Campaign Will Help Build and Fund New Shelter. “Breaking Ground, Rebuilding Lives is the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter’s (MMHS) effort to raise $2.75 million, which will build a new shelter to house 40 residents.” Read more to learn from Shelter Board and staff members about the need for a new Shelter.

Nov 2, The Many Roles of the Shelter. “The Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter (MMHS), located on Ticonic Street in downtown Waterville, is more than just a bed for the night. The staff at MMHS helps house residents rebuild their lives, a concept so important that the staff chose it as the name of their campaign to build a new facility: Breaking Ground, Rebuilding Lives.” Read more about the Shelter’s Action Plan Program and homeless prevention help. [Correction Note: Exec. Dir. Betty Palmer is indeed a powerhouse, but both the Action Program and prevention help are roles the Shelter instituted years ago (the pantry program started in 1991 for example)].

Nov 2. The Reality Behind being Homeless. “The most common misconception about homelessness is that it predominantly affects scruffy looking males, substance abusers, the mentally ill and those people too lazy to work. But one in four guests at the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter is a child, two out of five guests are women, and nearly 40 percent are families.” Read more to learn about Central Maine, national and state homelessness.

Nov 2. Finding Respite: A Young Mother at Mid-Maine. “It’s late in the evening and she’s exhausted. She’s got three girls in diapers and sleeping through the night is a rarity these days. The gentle, but hard-working mother turns 25 at the end of the November. She’s staying in the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter with her daughters now.”Read more to learn about this mother’s struggles.

Nov 2. A Room of Her Own. “Erica, a petite 20-year old dressed in a black turtleneck and glasses, sat in the kitchen of a scrupulously neat and sparse apartment. Her apartment. She surveyed the room, taking in the cherry-adorned shades as the sunlight comes through and smiling as she showed off her two-year old daughter’s painting she just brought home from pre-school. Erica said that she can’t wait to hang it up on the wall. The apartment is new to Erica and her daughter; it’s been two months since she moved in—two months since she was homeless, living with her daughter in the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter, and working tirelessly for a way out.” Read more about Erica’s dreams to finish college and raise her daughter.

Nov 2. Cold Road to Finding a Home: Angel’s Story. “Looking at the neatly arranged peppermint candles, bowls of seashells and polished stones that decorate his tidy one-room-apartment, there’s no indication that he spent most of his life living on the streets. His face beams through framed portraits on clean white walls, belying the nature of his past, and his name is spelled out colorfully in letter magnets stuck to the fridge. Angel, it reads. Though at first glance his easy smile and eager demeanor seem to suggest that everything has always been OK for him in life, Angel has never had it easy.” Read more about a formerly homeless man who now helps others who are homeless.

Nov. 2 Student Volunteers Pitch in Downtown. “For years, students on the Hill have engaged with residents at the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter (MMHS) through volunteer work. Colby Volunteer Center (CVC) Director Dana Roberts ’12 is a former CVC program leader for the CVC’s work in the MMHS. “The shelter has a very warm place in my heart,” Roberts said. “Read more about how Colby students have learned that homelessness in Central Maine is about neghbors.

Nov 2. A Matter of Circumstance. “A 31-year-old single father of three from Houlton, Maine had been staying at the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter for three weeks at the time of our interview.” Read more about another family’s struggles.