Fighting pandemic fallout from a new home
Bridgeport Rescue Mission’s new headquarters is feeding more, preparing for ‘tidal wave’ of addiction needs
BRIDGEPORT — Around six years ago, the Bridgeport Rescue Mission set out to expand its meal, housing and addiction treatments at a larger headquarters.
But just as the plan was becoming reality, those more extensive services suddenly became crucial to supporting the community through a global health crisis that ravaged the economy.
“If we hadn’t started renovating this first floor before COVID, we wouldn’t have been ready to respond the way we did last year,” Kim Fawcett, the mission’s chief revenue officer, said this week. “We’ve literally more than doubled our food distribution. It’s been an absolutely crazy year . ... We’re serving like 700 families a week right now.”
Bridgeport Rescue Mission, for years based out of 1088 Fairfield Ave., had in 2019 purchased and begun overhauling the closed Astoria Park nursing home on Park Avenue when the coronavirus pandemic struck Connecticut in March 2020.
The building will house a 125-seat community dining room, commercial kitchen, indoor food pantry and day services like mental health counseling and language courses on the ground floor; a residential program for mothers struggling with poverty/domestic violence and their children on the second floor; residential addiction recovery services for men and women on levels three and four; and a chapel/community space on the fifth floor.
Fawcett said the first floor “was completely renovated last summer but it was COVID so we couldn’t open” because of health guidelines preventing/ discouraging indoor gatherings to stop the illness’ spread.
Instead meals and food were — and still are — provided outdoors.
“We do daily distribution of either prepared meal bags or pantry bags stuffed with groceries and prepared indoors by volunteers,” Fawcett said. “We roll them in carts outside.”
With vaccinations underway throughout the state and congregate housing settings prioritized a few months back for shots, Fawcett said, “The next six months is a big six months for us, as long as COVID cooperates. You should see us bringing our food programs and comprehensive services into the first floor and launching our resident program for women and children on the second floor.”
That latter initiative was previously based on Sylvan Avenue. Fawcett said that building has been sold.
“We have no plans to sell 1088 (Fairfield Ave.),” Fawcett noted. “That’s the home of most of our residential men’s programs.”
However the coronavirus crisis has changed how the mission serves those clients. When the pandemic struck the emergency shelter operation and its temporary beds were closed.
“It was tragic. But serving the homeless during COVID and keeping the residential community living with us safe, we couldn’t figure it out,” Fawcett said. “Homeless guests come and go and you didn’t know where people were during the day.”
Last fall the shelter was re-opened as longer-term housing, Fawcett said. “Used to be you check in at 4 p.m., get dinner, spend the night, have breakfast and leave for the day,” she said. “That’s a pretty traditional shelter model. Last August we were like, we need to reinvent the way we’re doing this to serve the homeless, but safely.”
So the building at 1088 Fairfield Ave. went from accommodating a maximum of 25 homeless men to eight who live there long-term, receiving case management, counseling and job assignments while seeking permanent housing.
“It seems to be working so well that we’re really honing in on making that more how we care for the homeless going forward — serving fewer with more in-depth comprehensive services,” Fawcett said.
U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat whose district includes Bridgeport, has toured the Astoria Park site.
“They were so lucky to get that facility,” Himes said. “The thing that’s most exciting is it’s not just a shelter. People are surrounded by services, from food and nutrition to counseling that can help with mental health care and addiction. It’s really an ambitious, first-rate effort. It’s not just about putting a roof over somebody’s head. It’s about trying to get people back up on their feet.”
While the work on the new location continued during the pandemic, fundraising efforts to help pay for the $14 million price tag did not. Fawcett said the mission is now launching “phase 3” of that campaign “to raise the final $1.8 million that allows us to fully renovate the building.
“We still have, I would say, 12 to 15 months of renovations in front of us,” Fawcett said. “We’re doing one floor at a time.”
As the mission continues to try and feed more households impacted by COVID, Fawcett said she and her staff are also expecting their larger facility will soon be faced with additional pandemic fallout — an addiction treatment crisis.
“Because of the isolation of COVID, a lot of people living lives of sobriety lost connection with support services and relapsed into using drugs and alcohol,” she said. “They’re ‘functional addicts’ for many, many months. So there’s this prediction there is a tidal wave of relapses that have occurred but not bubbled to the surface, yet.”
Himes agreed: “Hunger is a problem that is very clear. We see it day in, day out . ... The mental health and addiction thing is a lot less visible. People are hesitant to show up at a hospital because we’re not gathering the way we did, pre-COVID. I think what’s going to happen is, as we begin to come out of this, we’re going to see a little bit of a hidden mental health, addiction and domestic violence problem.”
Using an ice hockey analogy, Himes said that the mission “is doing the classic ‘skating to where the puck is going to be’ ” and trying to be proactive.
“Nobody was ready for what happened,” Fawcett said of the coronavirus. “But having this physical building come online last summer was critical to helping us meet the needs of the community.”