Kendall County PADS Inaugural Season Nearing End

On April 16, the Kendall County Public Action to Deliver Shelter (PADS) will end its first season of providing shelter to homeless people.

Since it opened mid-October, the shelter has served 52 adults and 10 children, with between one and 12 people staying each night. Altogether, PADS has provided over 600 overnight stays.

“We think that 62 people is significant even though the average might not look like a lot,” PADS Director Anne Engelhardt said. “Some of our guests might come for a night or two, some it’s for a couple of weeks, and we’ve had some guests come for a month.”

PADS has been open every night since Oct. 17, with one of seven churches serving as the shelter site each night of the week.

 The doors to the shelter sites open at 7 p.m. and close at 7 a.m. When they arrive, guests are given drinks and a bag of toiletries and then dinner is served at 8 p.m. In the morning, guests eat breakfast, which is often a hot dish prepared by volunteers, and are given a sack lunch for the day.

The PADS organization is run completely by site coordinators and volunteers who sign up to work one of three shifts each night. Other volunteers prepare meals for the dinners and breakfasts, and countless more groups and individuals have donated items or raised money for the program.

When PADS started organizing last February, they began investigating the need for the program and researching how many homeless families lived in Kendall County. The number of homeless people is hard to determine, as there are no exact counts.

According to Engelhardt, there were 155 officially registered homeless children in kindergarten through grade 12 at public schools in Kendall County on Feb. 7. In addition, 91 children used the this winter.

Engelhardt said PADS uses those numbers as a barometer to guess how many homeless people live in the county.

“We don’t think we see homeless people around, but we do,” Engelhardt said. “Everybody sees them; we just don’t know they’re homeless, because they look so normal. They look like ordinary people. I have seen at least one guest at a library; you would not know that he was homeless.

"The guests, they’re not the stereotypical people you might see in a slum of the big city on a street corner with a paper sack with a bottle of alcohol in it," Engelhardt continued. "That’s not the type of people you see. Many, many of our guests are young people in their 20s or 30s.”

The guests at PADS range from people who have been unemployed for a long time to people who recently lost their jobs and lost their house or apartment because they didn’t have money to pay for it. PADS is available for people when they need shelter, although homeless people may not always be in a position where they have to ask for help from the organization.

Engelhardt suspects many more people would have used the shelter had it not been for difficulties with transportation. The volunteer churches are spread out in Plano, Yorkville, Oswego and Montgomery. Several of the churches are located miles from the cities, such as Cross Evangelical Lutheran Church on Route 47 in Yorkville and on Douglas Road in Oswego.

Engelhardt believes more guests would probably come if all the shelters were centrally located in the city. When people call to ask about the shelter, one of the first things she asks is whether they have their own transportation or can find transportation. Sometimes, guests can find friends or relatives who can take them to the shelters but may not have the space or finances to another person in their own home.

“I’ve had probably several dozen calls from people over the past 5 months, because my number is listed, and of those, I’d say less than half or fewer than half have actually found their way to our shelters,” Engelhardt said. “Transportation ends up being a tough problem, and we don’t have any kind of bus system that’s available.”

PADS hopes to begin working with Kendall County area public transit to help homeless people reach shelter sites next season. PADS closes for the summer, as many homeless guests choose to camp out or stay in their own cars during the warmer months. Engelhardt says that PADS will open again in mid-October, and so far all of the churches are still going to be in operation.

While the number of homeless people may change with the economy, Engelhardt thinks they may have more guests, or at least different ones, next season.

“Based on the fact that I believe we’ve been a very reliable organization that respects the dignity of people who are using it and respects their confidentiality, it’s very possible that information will be out there so other people who are in need will come,” Engelhardt said. “So we may see different people and we may see more, and of course a lot of it depends on the economy. Based on the fact that there will always be some percentage of unemployment, there’s always the possibility that people will be homeless.”