What We Did in One Year! - A note from Abram
At Iglutheca we do a lot with a small number of resources and staff. I wanted to show the scale of the services that we provide. The best way I can do this is with number, but ultimately it isn’t the numbers that matter. What matters is our effect on our guests' lives. Are we effective in helping them out of addiction and poverty? Are they experiencing love and compassion? These numbers can’t show love or compassion, but they help demonstrate the scale at which we are helping people.
Almost none of this would be possible without our partners at the Pine Ridge Reconciliation Center. They provide space in their building for day-shelter, their staff have cooked for us, and they have been great and finding grants and funding for the shelter to operate and we wouldn’t have been able to start the shelter when we did without them.
Who We Helped
This report includes data from June 12th, 2023, to June 12th, 2024. During this time, we served 956 Individuals, including 51 children and 150 elders. Most of these clients are from Pine Ridge District, but we served individuals from every part of the reservation. We also served many people from other reservations and people of other races who passed through Pine Ridge.
The Services We Provided
In total, we documented 55,499 assistance records during this time. An assistance record is created anytime we provide a service that we document including overnight shelter check-ins, day-shelter check-ins, meals, clothing donations, recovery meetings and more. I opted to leave a few services off of this report including case management and when we give out diapers on behalf of our partners at the Reconciliation Center.
Overnight Shelter
We provided 6768 nights of shelter over the past 365 days. An important caveat to this data is that we didn't start operating our shelter until mid-July 2023. At this point, we have 25-30 guests per night.
In the deadliest part of this winter, we had 42 guests in a single night.
This picture was taken around -15 degree Fahrenheit. The first tent was our low-barrier shelter, the second tent is women’s transitional and the men’s transitional tent is in the back.
Low-Barrier Shelter
The low-barrier shelter operated from December 15th to April 22nd. Low-barrier shelter was offered to anyone who needed it regardless of whether they were sober. We cannot let anyone freeze to death. When the weather got down to -36 Fahrenheit this winter we definitely saved some lives. In total we provided 1,354 night of low-barrier shelter.
It is stressful to run low-barrier shelter. Intoxicated and hungover clients could be jerks, even when we were saving their lives, we hired an additional staff member during this time to make sure that everyone was safe. I’ve heard some harm-reduction programs state: “dead people can’t recover.” By operating this low-barrier shelter we gave some addicted people a second chance. Our low-barrier shelter also gave some of our guests a place where they could sober-up so that they could enter into the transitional shelter program.
Transitional Shelter
Transitional Shelter is for those who are sober and trying to better their own lives. We do breathalyzers and urine analysis for our guests. Clients are also now required to attend one-on-one meetings with their caseworkers every week. We do a comprehensive assessment of our client's lives and we ask the clients about their goals. Based on the assessment, we will develop a set of big-picture goals that address both their dreams and any barriers to those dreams.
We use those big-picture goals to create 15 hours worth of tasks that the guests must complete for the week. depending on their goals these can be things such as:
Calling their dad on Father's Day
Attending six recovery meetings
Going to a counseling session
Studying for a GED test
Turning in job applications
Meeting with an AA sponsor
We started the transitional shelter in mid-July 2023 and as of June 12th had provided 5,414 nights of transitional shelter. Currently we are averaging around 25-30 guests per night.
We had a super bowl party at the day shelter this spring
Day Shelter
We currently are operating the day shelter every day from 8:30 AM to 3:00 PM. We are open to the public four days per week and we are only open to the transitional shelter clients on the other three days. In one year we had 14,928 check-ins to day shelter. We are providing way more people with day shelter now because until early October we only had day shelter three times per week.
Day Shelter Provides many services. We serve a lot of coffee. We provide vital services that allow clients to get jobs and education including a phone, a P.O. Box, and a computer lab. We do our guest's laundry, we have donated clothes that we give away. We provide have access to showers and women's hygiene products. Most importantly, we maintain a safe, substance free environment.
Showers
Over the past year we facilitated 8,931 showers. Before we opened, there was no public place to shower. I (Abram) briefly ran a volunteer led shelter, and I remember how badly everything stunk in that little building! We have showers now, and we provide the towels and hygiene products that they need.
Now everyone has the opportunity to be clean which gives them better chances to get jobs, or friends, or to reconnect with family. If you have ever been forced to go without a shower for a while you know how isolating it can be, how gross you can feel, and how blissful that first hot shower can feel!
Clothing
In one year, we gave out 3,882 articles of clothing. A lot of that was brand-new socks and underwear. We also stock men’s and women’s We want to be able to help the homeless to have enough clothes to rotate through outfits and to be able to wash their clothes once a week. We are currently very low on all men's clothes, so if you have any to donate that would be awesome.
One of our recent meals at the shelter.
Meals
We served in one year we served 18,989 meals. Our noon meal is offered to anyone in the community who is hungry. We have families with children and elderly people who sometimes join us for the meal. We provide dinners and a limited breakfast to our transitional shelter guests. Lakota culture is really generous around food, and scripture emphasizes feeding the hungry, so we are glad to feed as many as we do. In fact, 18,989 meals is not all the meals we provided. A lot of food went out the door without being counted, so it is safe to estimate that somewhere around 21,000 to 23,000 meals were provided in the year.
Recovery Meeting Attendance
AA, NA, and Celebrate Recovery are some of the things that I love the most. It is fantastic to celebrate new recovery milestones regularly. We only started counting our recovery meetings toward the end of October, so those statistics don’t capture the true amount of attendance. We also have a lot of non-homeless community members who attend the meetings and don’t sign the attendance sheets. Some of our attendees recently were selling drugs or alcohol to fund their own habits. It is cool to see them celebrating their months of sobriety. Despite these limitations and the occasional misplaced attendance sheet, we have recorded 1606 recovery meeting attendances.
What Matters Most
I’ve told our staff that nothing we do is important if we don’t do this with love. With so many needy people, it can be hard to show the level of care that we want for each individual. Despite this, I’ve seen lots of beautiful moments.
Small but Impactful Things
Mother Theresa said, "In this life, we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." I remember when one of the staff took time to teach a young lady with a severe mental illness how to do her makeup. I’ve often seen the shelter workers show extraordinary compassion to elders who wet their beds. I loved the way that the staff and guests whooped and hollered when one of our guests graduated high school. I’ve sat with several people who lost hope and listened to them and talked with them until they got their will to live back. These are just a few examples of how the staff show love in the little things.
Love Means We Help People Find Freedom Not Just Relief
It is a huge injustice to leave someone in a state of chronic homelessness or poverty. Giving someone a bed at the shelter is good, but love calls us to work hard to make sure that that shelter guest can one day sleep in their own bed. Our vision isn’t to give out lunches but to help our guests out of poverty so that they can cook their own meals and share with their families and community. This is why Iglutheca’s mission is “to provide a pathway for homeless Lakotas out of addiction and poverty.”
We recently started a new casework system that allows us to hold clients accountable for their progress. We develop individualized plans with clients. We are seeing clients starting to make progress in searching for jobs, saving money, getting into mental health appointments, etc. We’re excited to see what kinds of successes we will see in the coming months now that we have implemented this system.
We need help to continue doing what we do!
We no longer have any big grants to rely on. Without the grant, we need to raise an additional $12,400 per month to keep on operating. I’m worried about what it will take to keep our doors open. Our total cost per guest per night is under $25 per person per night even with all the wrap-around services such as casework, the computer lab, the P.O. Box the phone, the showers, the meals, 24-hour security, the clothes, etc.
Anything helps!
Here are a few price points you could give at:
- $25 enough to provide one night of shelter for one client.
- $175 enough to provide a client with an entire week of shelter
- $530 run the entire shelter for the day. Provide all of our overnight clients with a bed and access to a caseworker, help us run our recovery meeting, provide meals for 54 people, provide clean clothes and laundry, provide day shelter to 34 people.
Consider making monthly donations so that we can count on the help every day. You can send checks to:
Iglutheca
P.O. Box 5005
Pine Ridge, SD 57770
You can also use the donation button below to set up automatic monthly donations.
