Efforts underway to address dire need for emergency family shelter in Kalamazoo

A Way Home — Housing Solutions: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave’s series on solutions to homelessness and ways to increase affordable housing. It is made possible by a coalition of funders, including Kalamazoo County, the ENNA Foundation, and Kalamazoo County Land Bank.

KALAMAZOO, MI — A Kalamazoo advocacy organization is rallying to set up an emergency overnight shelter for unhoused families.

HOPE Thru Navigation, which had submitted a funding proposal to do that in October, was awarded a $100,000 grant on Jan. 6, 2026, by the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners to operate an overnight emergency shelter for families for the next three months.

“It is something that is not available in this county right now,” says Gwendolyn Hooker, chief executive officer of HOPE Thru Navigation. “There’s a lot of articles that have been talking about it, and that’s trending on the news right now.”

But she says, “We still have a large component of unhoused families that don’t have anywhere to go at night,” and “They (Kalamazoo County) came back and asked if we could still do it.”

Her nonprofit organization has been asked to get a family emergency shelter set up as soon as possible and operate it through March 31. HOPE Thru Navigation was founded in 2015 to provide support services to justice-impacted men, women, and families (as a result of incarceration); individuals with substance use disorder histories; and those who are chronically unhoused due to those issues. HOPE is an acronym that stands for Helping Other People Exceed.

Hooker is working quickly to prepare shelter space at two houses owned by Hope Thru Navigation. The organization hopes to provide overnight housing for up to three families at each house. One is a five-bedroom, two-bathroom dwelling that it has owned since 2022. It has used that residence for youth programming. Another is a duplex that it bought last year and has planned to use to provide housing and services for young people struggling with opioid and other substance addictions. The shelter will use its ground level, which has four bedrooms and a bathroom.

“We are trying to get bunk beds and get things situated so that we’re able to get families housed overnight by Friday when the weather turns into something else,” Hooker says.

Hooker says Housing Resources, Inc. is now the coordinated entry point for anyone seeking overnight shelter. Any family seeking shelter should contact HRI directly and before 5 p.m., at 269-382-0287, EXT 1, to get registered.

“We are prepared and have actually run shelter projects,” Hooker says. “We ran the Baymont (hotel shelter) project for seven months with unhoused people. We are more than capable of running a family shelter with six families in it.”

Potential participants need to be a family with at least one child.

“It could be a single mom with two kids,” Hooker says. “It could be a single mom with two kids. It could be a single guy with one kid. Whatever the case may be, there needs to be a child involved. It’s family sheltering.”

Jen Strebs, chairperson of the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners, said there were 147 families looking for emergency shelter recently.

“We know through the initial emergency shelter funding that we provided this winter that we have a population of folks still greatly in need of shelter support,” she says. “They are calling in each night looking for shelter. We know that the waiting list is long.”

She described the funding allocation to HOPE Thru Navigation as the next investment the county is making to provide shelter for the unhoused. 

Working with the City of Kalamazoo and the Kalamazoo County Continuum of Care before the onset of winter, the county was part of a $700,000 investment in providing shelter for the unhoused. The money included about $400,000 from the county and nearly $300,000 from the city. It is being used to:

• Expand Dignity In Motion’s Hope & Health Winter Shelter and Healing Initiative. It provides medical respite shelter for unhoused individuals whose medical conditions make them particularly unlikely to survive outdoors in winter weather;

• Help create overnight sheltering at Ministry With Community. What has primarily been a day shelter for the homeless now accommodates up to 160 people per night at its 500 N. Edwards St. location in downtown Kalamazoo;

• Fund the coordination of emergency placement services through Housing Resources Inc. Its personnel are expected to connect people with help. People in need may contact HRI at 269-382-0287.

Strebs says the county’s primary initiative, however, is The Landing Place shelter. It is the former Country Inn & Suites at 1912 E. Kilgore Road. That former hotel is being converted into an 80-unit shelter where unhoused families can find support as they transition to more permanent housing. It was expected to open in phases, starting before Christmas of 2025. But Strebs says its opening has been waylaid by regulatory hurdles. The county paid $5.6 million to acquire the former hotel property and is spending about $2.5 million to convert it.

The county hopes to have The Landing Place up and going during the first quarter of this year.

Hooker says the county is receiving calls every day for family sheltering, but Kalamazoo County Emergency Management says none of the shelters/warming centers have reported that they are at full capacity. That includes overnight shelters.

She says members of the HOPE Thru Navigation staff will manage the family shelter. The organization has a nine-person staff. Five are full-time employees. Four are part-timers. Hooker expects to employ two staff members at each house and provide services that help families transition to permanent housing.

While a typical overnight shelter provides supper and a bed for a night, it then requires them to leave the next morning. Hooker says HOPE’s family shelter will allow families to stay until they can find more sustainable housing rather than leave each day.

“What I proposed in my original proposal was that we could house up to six families between two homes, and they would be able to stay at these homes, and we would help them navigate services and supports to be able to find permanent housing during the timeframe that they are there,” she says. “So they would not have to pack up their stuff and leave, and come back, and call the number, and reapply, and da, da, da, da, da. We want to really have a transformative program where … the whole goal is to find them permanent housing. Getting them into permanent housing is the objective, period.”

What are families doing who cannot find shelter?

“My sense is that many families who are unhoused are doubled up with other families,” Strebs says. “Some are seeking other shelter. There are some family shelter beds that are provided at the Kalamazoo Gospel Mission or the YWCA domestic violence shelter. So they’re seeking those other options, or they’re doubled-up.”

But people are trying to help.

“I think that what’s good is that the community continues to recognize the need to address the housing shortage in the community,” Strebs says, “and is working to find solutions and collaborations with our nonprofit housing sectors to make that happen. We know this is a large problem. It’s one faced by communities all across the country. That’s why we’re going to continue to work at it together. Each of these programs does not solve the struggle in front of us nor provide everyone in need with supports. But it advances toward that end. And we’re committed to keeping at it.”