LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Louisville day and overnight shelter is moving in hopes it can expand its reach.
Re:Center Ministries has been helping and serving Louisville’s homeless community for decades.
Its new headquarters will provide more overnight and daytime shelter space when it opens next year. Renovations are underway on 757 South Brooks Street, as Re:Center Ministries reshapes a long vacant sanctuary.
“We’re going to have a dorm here and a dorm here as well and then our office suite behind us,” Cory Bledsoe told Spectrum News 1 during a tour of the new space.
Bledsoe is the executive director. He explained Re:Center is relocating from the NULU neighborhood to across the street from the Hope Village.
“We’re going to continue to offer the same services we offer now, which is emergency day shelter for women and children, emergency overnight shelter for men and long-term programming for men. We’re going to pick those services up, so to speak, and then move them to this new location,” Bledoe said.
Bledsoe said the new address will allow Re:Center to more than double the number of emergency overnight shelter beds for men. Right now, there are 12 beds; with the move, the center can have 40 beds.
“But as the guys are progressing, after that recovery phase is what we call our transition phase,” Bledoe said. “So this is where we are building those skills and relationships, those community relationships back with employment, reconciling any sort of barriers.”
The number of women and children they can serve with their day shelter will increase as well.
“We have hundreds of single individuals across the city who are waiting to get into a shelter, so every time we can add beds to that need, that is exactly what we need,” Natalie Harris of Louisville’s Coalition for the Homeless said.
Harris said Re:Center is a part of their network of Louisville shelters.
“Coalition for the Homeless makes reservations each night when there is a vacancy in shelter in the community, so we know that we need so many beds because we are able to fill those empty beds within an hour every day,” Harris explained.
As Re:Center prepares for the move, its goal is to avoid any stoppage in services.