Thurman Brisben Homeless Shelter, Inc.

The Brisben Center provides temporary/transitional shelter for men, women, and children experiencing homelessness. We help them resolve their immediate crises and develop results-based plans to secure and sustain housing. We help them resolve or begin to resolve the underlying causes of their homelessness so they do not return to it. Measured impacts are livable wage income, sustainable housing, and decreased returns to shelter.

1) The provision of Brisben transitional shelter meets a critical need in this community for men, women, and children who have become homeless. The Brisben Center is not just a shelter, though. It is a child-safe, clean, dignified, orderly, and definitively helpful place to begin the recovery process. Its location on the bus line and provision of loaner bicycles facilitates transportation to employment and business appointments. A computer lab makes it convenient to research jobs, trainings, and career options. Spacious grounds allow for recreation, quiet space, and children’s play areas. A continuous schedule of programs and activities inculcate a culture of progress. The food, prepared and served by community volunteers, is nutritious and delicious. Clients feel cared about.

2) After clients are settled in and no longer in a state of shock, they begin to address their immediate barriers to housing with an assigned case manager. Do they need an ID? Do they have sustainable income? How much debt? Can they work? What is the state of their mental and physical health? Are criminal and/or eviction records holding them back? Do their children have special needs? Most residents want to return to housing as quickly as possible.

3) However, more profound changes are usually required to overcome the poverty underlying most instances of homelessness, and this is where the Brisben Center goes well beyond the role of a typical shelter. We provide clients with as many opportunities as we can to make such transformation possible. Mobility Mentoring® is the most ambitious of these, but the other afore-mentioned services, such as job help, also play a critical role. In its programmatic choices, staff is ever guided by the desired impacts of livable wage income, sustainable housing, and decreased returns to shelter.

• Provide and maintain a 16,000 square foot, 80 bed, energy-efficient, transitional shelter, fully staffed and open 24/7 year-round to stabilize and temporarily shelter women, children and men, both families with children and single adults.
• Retain professional, experienced staff who provide transformative case management to help clients regain housing and work on resolving the underlying causes of their poverty and homelessness.
• Direct a full complement of in-house and external programs that help clients address whatever barriers they are facing, especially in the area of income and income generation.
• Retain a team of skillful and compassionate shelter monitors who, around the clock, oversee safe and productive shelter life for those who call the Brisben Center their temporary home.
• Retain a Mobility Mentoring® program manager who selects clients, screens and trains mentors, supervises interns/support staff, oversees data collection & reporting, and otherwise ensures the program is having its desired impacts.
• Retain a skilled kitchen manager to provide healthy, satisfying meals through the support of volunteers and in-kind donors.
• Continue building a comprehensive system of social metrics—data collection, analysis, and reporting—to ascertain progress and inform program design.
• Maintain a strong and dynamic base of community volunteers who provide facility & grounds upkeep, activities staffing, administrative/fundraising support, board service, and more. Our close connection to the community has historically been, and remains, critical to the fulfillment of our mission.

• Since 1988, the Brisben Center has been greater Fredericksburg’s main provider of shelter and services to families and individuals experiencing homelessness. Those 35 years of experience give us a clear understanding of approaches that work. Two current board members have been with the organization since its founding. Two are former residents.
• Master’s level trained case management and Mobility Mentoring® staff, in addition to many years of professional experience, ensure clients are provided with the best possible guidance.
• A commitment to evidence-based outcomes and a state-of-the-art social metrics database allows us to document outputs/outcomes in great detail, make programmatic modifications as warranted, and report back to stakeholders with transparency and increasing sophistication.
• Fiscal prudence keeps costs low. We own the building outright. Staff wear multiple hats. A rooftop solar array and other climate-friendly upgrades keep electricity costs near zero. Volunteers provide, prepare, and serve nearly all the meals—amounting to an in-kind value of $175,000. Our 2,000 volunteers maintain the building & grounds, provide administrative/fundraising support, staff activities, and much more. They are an integral part of the organization.
• A strong working partnership with EMPath, the developer of Mobility Mentoring®.
• Programmatic partnerships with many agencies, such as the Virginia Department of Health, Virginia Cooperative Extension, area public schools, and Germanna Community College.

Since CEO David Cooper took the helm in 2018, the Brisben Center has made tremendous progress toward its goals.
• A three-year strategic plan (2020-23), the board’s first, was adopted in 2019 with the guidance of a BoardSource facilitator. Also updated were the organization’s mission, vision, values, and by-laws. A new strategic plan will be developed and voted on in CY2023.
• The Brisben Bridge Theory of Change was published in 2021.
• Staff is now regularly trained in Mental Health First Aid, CPR/First Aid, Mandated Reporter, and Revive (overdose response). Trauma-Informed Care and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are being added.
• A Brisben Center approach to Mobility Mentoring® has been carefully designed and implemented. It is gradually being integrated with case management so participating clients’ experience will be seamless from their intake to a year or more post-shelter. Program expansion is envisioned for upcoming years.
• A full-time kitchen manager/chef is now overseeing the production and quality of meals.
• The Apricot Core database by Social Solutions has been implemented and is being further customized to measure our programming.
• Capital improvements include a 115Kw rooftop solar array, high-efficiency HVAC units with a UV microbial/bacteriostatic filter, a changeover to LED lighting, major build-out of office space, and replacement of commercial kitchen appliances. This year, we are submitting proposals for the replacement of our walk-in cooler/freezer.
• The Brisben Center’s congregate shelter faced massive challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. With scores of fatalities in assisted living facilities near and far, we had exceedingly difficult choices to make. With tremendous work of an ad hoc board/staff committee, guidance from local health epidemiologists & OSHA, and the grace of God, we got through it without any deaths or debilitating cases. Even, today, however, with continuing guidance from VDH, we require masking, testing at admission, and set-aside quarantine space. We hope and pray for a return to normalcy in the coming year.