By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – Early Monday morning a sign went up outside 90 Maple St., quietly establishing a chapter in the borough’s history: The Heartwarming Center. Est. 2023.
The center, a community effort organized by the First Baptist Church at 84 Maple St., is the first and only women’s warming center in the Two River area. Last year, many women without permanent shelter were turned away from the available male-only centers. Right now, the warming center cannot provide shelter for children, but organizers hope that will change in the future.
While the Heartwarming Center opened in early November and has been accepting women for a few weeks now, efforts at renovating the structure to suit the needs of a community shelter are still ongoing.
The center provides temporary housing to women experiencing homelessness during Code Blue nights when temperatures fall below freezing. Pilgrim Baptist Church, in partnership with the JBJ Soul Kitchen, has been providing a place for homeless men at the Hope and Comfort Center during cold days at 166 Shrewsbury Ave. since it opened in 2018. But there was a “dire need” for women, said First Baptist Church co-Pastor Steve Brown.
As part of the borough’s Code Blue team, Brown would pick up men after dinner church gatherings and drive them to the men’s warming center where they could stay overnight, shower or do laundry but, he said, he couldn’t offer the same to women.
“Last winter,” Brown said, perhaps “because of the economy” and a rise in housing costs, several women who were “probably on the margins” had to be turned away every night because the warming centers available were only meant for men.
“We just kept praying for a solution for the women,” Brown said, and a couple of weeks later the owner of the two-story house next to First Baptist offered to sell it to the church. Brown, along with co-Pastor Jared Murray, reached out to their congregation and 96% of the church voted in favor of purchasing the property for use as a women’s center.
“We kind of stepped out in faith because we really didn’t have the money – at least on paper – to buy it,” Brown said, noting they used half the church’s savings to buy the home, a risky proposition as church attendance nationally has been falling since COVID. They secured a mortgage from Ocean First Bank and closed on the property in September and have been actively trying to renovate it with the help of private and government donations.
In order to accommodate as many women as possible, they installed a new water heater for showers, a laundry facility and a new kitchen.
“We’re not flush with a lot of cash by any means, but we have enough to keep things going throughout this season,” said Brown.
To open up the home for one night costs the church about $500, which includes two security personnel, a coordinator and the cost of utilities, food and incidentals. According to Brown, anywhere from 85 to 100 Code Blue nights are expected this season; multiplied by $500 a day, the church could spend almost $50,000 to keep the center open.
And that’s “just the bare bones operations of running it,” Brown said, “not including any construction that we’re doing or upkeep or mortgage.”
The first floor can accommodate 10 to 12 women; the second floor is a one-bedroom apartment being rented out to offset some of the expenses. There have been almost 15 Code Blue nights since Nov. 1 and the facility has housed 8 to 10 women from the Red Bank area and an additional two or three from Monmouth County’s Code Blue program.
The county, through its Office of Emergency Management, has a Code Blue Policy for issuing emergency notifications about winter weather conditions to local municipalities and social services agencies that provide services to at-risk individuals living outdoors, on the streets, in parks or other poorly insulated settings who are at risk for cold-related exposure and possible death.
At the Nov. 9 Monmouth County Commissioner’s meeting, the county entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with First Baptist Church to pay the church an annual retainer of $15,000 to provide overnight space during any Code Blue alerts issued by the county.
According to The Feast, a ministry partner of First Baptist that provides “dinner church,” free meals every Sunday evening, “Monmouth County spends nearly $200,000 on hotel placements for homeless individuals” but the hope is that “churches and other organizations can help address this issue.”
“We’re still getting calls from all over Monmouth County to try to get women in here, but we just don’t have a lot of space,” Brown said.
“It’s not just the need for Red Bank… but it’s a need throughout Monmouth County.”
It is “an expensive endeavor,” Brown said, “but again, it’s a worthwhile one, for sure.”
The article originally appeared in the December 14 – December 20, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
