Isa Cruz

Yesterday, Tedford Housing, a nonprofit organization in Brunswick dedicated to helping people experiencing homelessness, opened a new facility in Cook’s Corner with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The new facility centralizes and expands the organization’s previous locations, increasing Tedford’s capacity to provide family and individual housing by 60 percent.

The process of opening this new shelter started in 2014 with a goal of expanding and replacing Tedford’s previous facility. Andrew Lardie, the executive director of Tedford Housing, found that fundraising was the biggest challenge to opening the shelter.

“It’s a big lift to have enough fundraising capacity, both as far as who your donors are and what the things you do to raise money are,” Lardie said. “It’s a big lift for an organization to go from sustaining a more modest footprint to setting its sights higher and trying to both build and then also sustain a larger programmatic presence. It’s just not easy to find all those dollars.”

A collection of donors throughout Maine contributed to this fundraising effort. Key funding sources included a $1.5 million United States Department of Housing and Urban Development grant, a $1.75 million donation from Cumberland County, a $500,000 donation from the Maine Health Mid Coast Hospital and a $40,000 donation from the Bowdoin McKeen Center’s Common Good grant. Lardie, as a previous associate director for service and leadership at the McKeen Center, still connects the McKeen Center’s volunteers and funding with Tedford Housing.

“Bowdoin is a really important part of Tedford’s success.… What I did at the McKeen Center is I helped connect young people to opportunities for active citizenship, developing their identity as a citizen and participating in whatever community they find themselves in,” Lardie said. “It was useful for the agencies that I was in relationship with because the students would turn over…, but I was a point of stability.”

Aubrey Gifford ’28, an intern at Tedford through the McKeen Center, emphasized the importance of personalization in connecting with donors. Part of her internship was writing hundreds of handwritten letters to different organizations asking for donations.

“The handwritten letter distinguishes you in a way and makes [donors] think, ‘Oh, out of all these organizations that are asking for my money, this one took the time,’’’ Gifford said. “The executive director handwrote a letter.… In general, there was someone’s hands on every letter. I think it just shows a level of care that you don’t [usually] see.”

Gifford found that the care Tedford puts into its projects extends to the new facility as well.

“I was really blown away with how much thought and attention to detail had gone into [the facility],” Gifford said. “It’s a huge facility, and it feels homey.… That’s the whole point.”

The new facility also focuses on personalization with its clients. The new facility will have three secure wings under one roof: one for families, one for adults and one for staff. Lardie is hoping that the structure of the new facility will create more connections between clients and staff in the center.

“There’s going to be a lot more collaboration and a lot more opportunity to have relationships across the programs between different staff and guests, for example, and just among the staff,” Lardie said.

Ultimately, Lardie hopes that the new facility will allow people experiencing homelessness to get on their feet as quickly as possible.

“[If] we can shorten the length of stay in the shelter, that means you turn over beds faster, and that means in the same calendar year, you can serve more people,” Lardie said. “The goal is to have everybody’s experience of homelessness and experience in the shelter be a one-time experience and be [as] short as possible and never happen again.”

Maine faces some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the United States. During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Greg Payne, the senior housing advisor to Governor Janet Mills, commented on this issue, looking towards the future of both governance and nonprofit work addressing homelessness.

“There are more than twice as many people in Maine who are extremely low-income as there are housing units that are available and affordable to them. That makes homelessness less of a risk for Maine people and more of a mathematical certainty.… We are facing some serious headwinds right now, and especially in the past week, as the federal government announced that it is going to remove permanent housing supports from more than 1,200 people who are currently housed across our state, most of whom have a disability,” Payne said.

Lardie, too, worries what the future of addressing homelessness will look like, considering President Donald Trump’s administrative shift away from Housing First policies that will cut funding from government programs attempting to house people.

“We are having this moment of celebration at the same time that we’re having this true crisis that is coming into focus for the [social work] sector broadly,” Lardie said.