Maine Homeless Shelters Face New Challenges Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

The Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter in Waterville. (Robbie Feinberg/Maine Public)

Daily life has changed drastically as Mainers take steps to slow the spread of the new coronavirus. Preparing and maintaining needed services for homeless clients has proven to be a challenge for shelters, who are dealing with limited space, supplies and a dramatic decline in the numbers of volunteers.

On a recent morning, Katie Spencer White walks through the entrance of Waterville’s Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter to a nearly empty lobby.

“It’s so quiet. Our parking lot is usually full. You’d struggle to get a parking space. And I drove on today and it’s just almost empty. So this is our new normal.”

And that new normal has posed serious challenges for shelters like this one, where she serves as executive director. White says it’s not easy to follow CDC-recommended “social distancing” guidelines in an area where almost 50 guests sleep only a few feet from each other.

“It’s like summer camp. Very, very condensed, all under one roof, where we’ve got rooms of eight beds and then communal dining,” Wight says. “There’s lots of things that we are changing, to adapt to the crisis. But it does become a matter of square footage. There’s only so far you can spread people out before you hit the wall.”

So the shelter has been forced to get creative: “you can see right now we’ve broken all the furniture down, and we’re hoping to be able to move this out in the next couple of days.”

Read the rest of this story at Maine Public’s website.