And while we’re still passionate about moving people out of homelessness, for the last year we have all just been trying to survive the COVID-19 pandemic and this uncertain social and economic climate.

You see, we’re the last stop. We’re the end of the road for many, who for one reason or another, have no where to go. We turn no one away, regardless of faith, mental health, sobriety – or COVID-19.

It hasn’t been easy. A year ago we moved all of our clients out of our congregate shelter into separate rooms in three different hotels. This meant that we staffed and oversaw the workings of four different locations (including our primary shelter) 24/7. Every one of these locations was at full capacity all day, every day, helping those without a home, shelter-in-place. And it worked! We kept hundreds of neighbors without a home safe during the spikes and valleys of the pandemic. In turn we were also able to help to maintain the greater public health of Flagstaff and northern Arizona.

At the start of April 2021, a year after we had moved everyone out (with more than 2/3rds of our staff and clients vaccinated, and with the financial burden of hoteling 250+ people a night becoming too great) our Board of Directors and the FSS leadership team decided it was time to move back into our congregate shelter on Huntington Dr. We’re practicing social distancing here, which is a challenge within itself. We’re screening everyone who comes to us, mandating masks, cleaning and sanitizing everything on repeat, and insisting on hand washing. North Country HealthCare is onsite with their mobile unit to vaccinate anyone willing and to test for Covid as often as possible. And we have a safety plan – we maintained a block of rooms at a hotel for our most medically vulnerable clients, and for anyone who tests positive for Covid.

We’re still doing everything we can to keep our clients – and the rest of the community – safe from the pandemic’s reach.

It’s not perfect. It has been as hard and as terrifying as you might imagine over this past year. But we don’t give up. We don’t know how.

Our primary goal right now is to keep folx in our emergency shelter safe, and to move as many of them as possible into permanent homes of their own. We were hoping to replenish our operations funding with our Feast for Flagstaff fundraiser in May, but just like last year, we had to cancel this as well as so many other fundraisers. Not having Feast for the second year in a row has had a devastating impact on our normal streams of funding. We have to keep momentum in the fight against homelessness in our city. This means we have to keep fighting for each and every one of our neighbors. Covid isn’t over, and the surest way to keep our community safe, is to make sure our vulnerable neighbors have a stable place to call home.

This pandemic has hit us all hard. We know it. But if you’ve thought about how you can help your neighbors get through this, we need you now more than ever. We will keep fighting for these neighbors, we just need your help.