Good Shepherd Center launches ‘Home for Good’ campaign

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — The Good Shepherd Center is launching a new campaign it hopes will help address chronic homelessness in the community.

The goal of the Center’s “Home for Good” campaign is to create additional housing and expand its Martin Street campus. There are also plans to use the land across from the current shelter for the project.

Good Shepherd Center Executive Director Katrina Knight says the shelter currently has space for four families with children.  With the campaign, it hopes to have enough space to accommodate up to eight families with children with intensive case management on site.

The campaign also includes a permanent supportive housing model for the chronically homeless which would an additional 70 units to the 48 the Center currently has. 

“So we can conceivably double the number of homeless families for children that we are sheltering and then helping to become rehoused again in the community,” Knight said. “Also on that expanded campus, we would like to incorporate more units of what they call permanent supportive housing. That’s kind of the gold standard, in helping chronically homeless folks with disabilities realize a successful and lasting return to housing.”

Some of the units will be similar to the Lakeside Reserve units the Good Shepherd Center already manages.

The Center is hoping to preserve “fifteen units of affordable housing for chronically homeless folks with disabilities,” said Knight.  “Just a couple of days ago, the city of Wilmington voted to convey a small property to us on Carolina Beach Road, and so that will provide yet another opportunity to move the needle for affordable housing for chronically homeless folks by creating what — we hope — will be 32 apartments.” 

Knight says that with the current housing units the shelter manages, they have seen the positive impact it has on those who were chronically homeless.  They hope to expand that reach.

“If you have fallen into a housing crisis and remain there for a period of time, it’s very easy to feel hopeless that you will ever get to experience what it’s like to have a regular roof over your head,” said Knight. “We’ve seen with our past experience just how transformative it is to have a pretty, clean, healthy, respectful apartment  to call your own.”

To make this vision feasible, the Good Shepherd Center has a goal of raising $20 million. So far, they have $1.5 million in commitments for the new campaign. 

The Center hopes to have everything done — including possible construction — by 2026.