GREAT FALLS — First United Methodist Church and Housed Great Falls on Wednesday reported an increase in visitors during the winter at their cold weather drop-in center, which served more than 1,700 hot meals this winter to those looking for a warm place to go.
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Housed Great Falls operates a cold weather drop in center at First United Methodist Church, with the help of volunteers, when temperatures drop down to 25 degrees. During the winter, about 90 volunteers dedicated 828 hours so the center could be open 73 nights, including nearly 50 consecutive nights.
Housed Great Falls chair Lela Graham says they’ve served more and more people at the drop in center as the need for shelter in Great Falls continues to grow, saying, “We saw many more people, last year we averaged about 25, this year we averaged over 30 a night. It was astounding, sometimes we had 50 people, sometimes 70.”
Shannon Wilson, who also serves as a Great Falls city commissioner, has been volunteering at the drop in center since it began in 2022.
She says, “You see chronic homeless people come in, but there's newly homeless people, too. And contrary to popular belief, they're not all drunks and addicts. There's a lot of people that have really been down on their luck and they lose their home and they're out on the street. It's hard to get a job and pick yourself back up again when you don't have an address, and you don't have a place to land.”
Housed Great Falls and First Methodist Church are also working to find solutions to the housing needs of the community, and have launched long-term plans to build a pallet shelter community to provide transitional housing for unhoused and unsheltered members of Great Falls.
They displayed a prototype of what one of those shelters would look like outside the church, with space for a bed, a sink, heater, AC unit, and an outlet.
The organizations are raising money to buy land to build around 20 of the single-occupancy units. Each 8’x12’ unit would cost between $4500 and $5000 to build. The entire project would cost around $1.5 million, with annual operating costs around $400,000.
Rev. Dawn Maurer Skerritt, a Pastor at United Methodist, explains, “Our focus group is people that fall through the cracks of almost all the other agencies. Great Falls is on schedule to have a significant housing crisis as we grow, and so we want to be prepared and have transitional housing.”
From February 4, 2025:
