‘Life saver’: A night at Bloomington’s winter emergency shelter

Editor’s note: Do you want to volunteer at the shelter? Are you looking for emergency shelter when the weather gets frigid? Fill out a volunteer interest form here and find more information about the shelter here.  

Ben James has frostbite in his fingers.  

Pretty soon, he said, he could lose one of them. 

The Bloomington resident has been without permanent shelter for four and a half years. In that time, he said, he’s been banned from Beacon’s Shalom Community Center and Wheeler Mission, local homeless shelters, and the public library. Two of those were after James got into confrontations with other people he said provoked him. 

But James said he does what he can to help other unhoused people — he knows what it’s like to lay unconscious in the rain, stepped over by his fellow Bloomington residents.  

On Feb. 20, James was one of 32 guests at the Bloomington Severe Winter Emergency Shelter, a temporary, entirely volunteer-run shelter which opens on nights of extreme cold conditions. It has fewer barriers to entry than other local shelters — no programs, no sobriety requirement and no bans. They even allow dogs.  

Without it, he’d be left to the elements in a week which saw low temperatures in the single digits. The work of volunteers and heat of the Kirkwood Avenue church were what kept him and other unhoused people warm — and alive. 

But Caleb Hoagland, shelter volunteer coordinator, said they need more volunteers. They need more donations. They need spring to come.  

“I just don’t want to see people in my community freeze to death,” Hoagland said. 

*** 

It’s 8:30 p.m. — check-in time.  

“Send up the first two women, please!” Isabel Piedmont-Smith, this volunteer shift’s lead and city council vice president yelled. 

Less than a week later, a person who claimed to be a former volunteer at the shelter demonstrated with a gun outside City Hall, distributing flyers with QR codes saying they were banned for criticizing city council members volunteering at a “shelter that they facilitated the conditions for creating.” That person also alleged other volunteers had misgendered them; Hoagland told The B Square Bulletin he wasn’t aware of those allegations. He added the shelter always makes an effort to prioritize transgender people and does not stand for that behavior. 

For over the next hour, volunteers downstairs sent shelter guests in line outside up the steps and elevator to the hallway into First Christian Church’s Great Hall. Piedmont-Smith, along with two volunteers, greeted them.  

To each new arrival, a volunteer asked which belongings they’d like stored in a separate room and which they’d like with them. Suitcases, bags and a shopping cart rigged with tarps and blankets were checked; a baby doll, a pillow and a small dog in a pink sweater named Sophia stayed with their owners. 

Though the shelter is low barrier, no drugs are allowed inside. On the check-in table sat a needle disposal container. All medications are checked in at the front, too. 

Next, the guests went through a metal detector check. Laurie Riggins, a lecturer at the IU School of Medicine who also volunteers at Beacon, operated the “magic wand.”  

“I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Laurie,” she said before scanning one person. Volunteers knew another woman didn’t like the detector around her head, so Riggins made sure to oblige. 

Riggins said the shelter serves people with a wide range of temperaments and mental illnesses, which makes it important for volunteers to be present and not rush. She pays special attention to learning names and making eye contact with guests, she said, because people walking by on the street often don’t even look at unhoused people.  

Each guest got a number or letter to mark their belongings and bed. The shelter, which started in 2024 as a collaboration between local faith communities, prioritizes women because of a lack of sufficient shelter tailored to them. In 2023, shortly before the start of the Bloomington Severe Winter Emergency Shelter, Wheeler Mission closed its emergency women’s shelter. Hoagland said while fewer women experience homelessness than men, they tend to have worse experiences on the street. 

Next, they let in men who are elderly or otherwise medically frail. Then come all other unhoused men. The shelter also allows guests to reserve spots in advance during periods of cold like this week. 

The volunteers’ work began about an hour before check-in. They set out mattresses in lines in the Great Room, fitting each with sheets, pillows and a blanket. Next to the beds they set chairs for guests to put their belongings with a piece of tape reading the number or letter.

They also set out coffee, earplugs and snacks donated from local churches.  

When guests finished in the hallway, volunteer Kaity Crow, a social work major at IU, directed them where to go. There were a few adjustments, including for a couple who came together and a pair of friends who wanted to be by each other, but the guests began to grab snacks and settle in the 30 beds. 

But the night wasn’t over yet. A guest put a Bodyarmor sports drink in the automated external defibrillator box, which volunteers worried would automatically call emergency services. A man showed up downstairs yelling for his shopping cart. The guest who’d checked it in admitted it was the other man’s, and the volunteers returned it. 

One woman, a shelter guest, began yelling at another man — she was having a “bad day,” as some volunteers described it. So they moved her mattress farther away from her neighbor to accommodate her. 

“An extra foot of space might not seem like anything to us, but to a woman who’s on the street who has, I guarantee you, experienced horrible trauma, that foot of space can make a huge difference,” Hoagland, the volunteer coordinator, said. 

While the shelter doesn’t issue bans, coordinators sometimes schedule meetings with guests to mutually resolve issues, Hoagland said. He said approaching conflict boils down to empathy — understanding the unhoused guests can spend over 13 and a half hours, or more, every day in the cold without food, bathrooms or a place to go.   

“I would be in a shitty mood too,” he said. 

Hoagland was there that evening filling in for another volunteer who couldn’t make it, in addition to his shift the next morning. A veteran and former wine director for a liquor store chain, he fills in whenever the shelter needs someone — which he had more time for since quitting his last job a few weeks before. 

Downstairs though, there were more people in line — people the shelter couldn’t house. Hoagland said in situations like this, he calls the Stride Center, which transports people to other shelters.  

Though the shelter has an official capacity of 30, up from 20 when it started, Hoagland said they can sometimes make room for a few more. It’s a “judgment call,” he said, based on who shows up and how the night is going. That evening, the shelter let in a woman who arrived after check-in and a man who previously had frostbite and was medically frail for a total of 32 guests. 

Hoagland worries the homelessness crisis will only get worse, putting more strain on shelters. He pointed to potential federal funding cuts and a lack of housing as reasons why the city needs more emergency shelters. 

“We can fill out all the rapid rehousing forms we want,” Hoagland said. “We’re not building more houses.” 

By around 10:30 p.m., volunteers turned off most of the lights in the Great Room. Different volunteers would stay throughout the night.  
 
Hoagland left shortly before 11 p.m. He’d be back for his scheduled shift in three hours.  

*** 

Shelter guests took their morning smoke break before the sun came up, around 6:15 a.m. Volunteer Eli Marti stood outside with them. Marti got connected with the shelter through their church, First United Methodist. They worked the morning shift before the first-year IU student’s 9 a.m. class. 

Marti, who tries to volunteer once a week, is “terrible with names.” But they know the names and faces of the people the shelter serves. 

“I want to keep helping these people, and I want to keep making sure people are okay to the best of my ability,” Marti said. “Sometimes it’s not much. Sometimes it’s just being here.” 

Guests had to be checked out by 7 a.m. before the church’s morning programs for children, Hoagland said. That’s also before the sun’s fully up, and an hour before the Shalom Center opens.  

As guests filtered out, volunteers began cleaning the Great Room and its beds. They collected the bedding in bags, which 81-year-old IU biology instructor Dan Watts came and collected later that morning in his red 2014 Ford Fusion. 

Watts said he served as president of the board of the Bloomington Interfaith Shelter, the current emergency shelter’s predecessor. He said he and other volunteers drive the sheets to Wheeler Mission to be laundered. 

Watts believes the emergency shelter is a temporary answer to the city’s homelessness crisis but not a permanent one. He’s part of First Presbyterian Church, which he said is why he keeps coming back. 

“If we were, you know, living out the faith that we say that we were supposed to be doing, then we do things like this,” Watts said. “And there’s no other explanation other than that.” 

Guests checking out collected their bags, received hand warmers and made reservations for that night, if spots were available. Hoagland gave socks to one person who needed a new pair. The shelter that night would be at First United Methodist Church instead, a volunteer reminded guests. 

One guest said at check-out the shelter had “been a life saver.” 

Another was 45-year-old Joe Shuler. It was his second night at the shelter, and he’d also stayed at Friend’s Place, an overnight shelter run by Beacon. He’s been without permanent shelter for about a year; another time, he went two years without permanent shelter.  

Shuler said there’ve been times he couldn’t get into a shelter and had to face the cold at night, relying on a fire in a can fueled by hand sanitizer. 

“Later today I might do it,” he said, but he planned on going to the shelter if it wasn’t full.  

“These people care about people, that’s what’s the best thing about it,” Shuler said. “You know, you need more people like that in the world.” 

Shuler and the other guests went off into the city to find anywhere — bus stations, the library, the Shalom Center — to escape the cold throughout the day. Meanwhile, the laundry would be done. Sheets would be fitted. People would line up. And that night, the shelter would open its doors once again.