I have started doing some work for the homeless shelter in my city.
Some of the work gets done at the church, but quite a bit of it has to be done at the actual shelter.
For example, once a month, a group of the people from my church go to the shelter to cook and serve a meal.During this time I have discovered that there are quite a few strange regulations about running a homeless shelter. The first strange one is that they are required to serve three meals a day plus two snacks a day. Now I realize that they are people, and they certainly deserve dignity and good treatment, but two years ago during the height of the pandemic, a family member of a resident actually sued them because they did not serve snacks for three days of a month. In addition, there is another strange rule. That rule says that they must have both Heating and Cooling available every single day, and if there is a day when they do not have air conditioning or a heater, depending on the season, they are not allowed to open. That is crazy because I have lived without air conditioning and without Heating many times over the course of my life. There were times when I could not afford to get my air conditioning repaired oh, so I lived without it. I lived without air conditioning in my car for 5 years because I could not afford the cost of getting the AC fixed. And think of this. If they don’t open because they don’t have AC or heating, because it’s broken while awaiting repair, the people who would otherwise go there are stuck outside where the thermostat might read triple digits!