The Morgan County Homeless Coalition will hold a groundbreaking ceremony Saturday March 5 at 10 am for a new homeless shelter in Berkeley Springs.
For the past five years, the coalition has been providing shelter to the homeless during the winter months at motels and churches in the area.
The new homeless shelter will have nine individual rooms, a shower, a common space and kitchenette with coffee maker and maybe a microwave.
The shelter will be housed in the former pawn shop north of town next to the Refuge Church and 7-Eleven. The homeless coalition will be renting the space from the Refuge Church, which owns the building.
There is no solid count of the number of homeless in Morgan County. But Neil Zimmerman, a volunteer with the homeless coalition, told Morgan County USA that “over the past five years, the coalition has had a maximum of about five or six guests at any one time, and usually less than that.”
Zimmerman said that the “guests change quite often, so that there are some long term homeless people but also many transiently homeless – teenagers who are in arguments with family, people who’ve lost shelter and others who need a place to stay for a short period of time.”