ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Between serving soup and setting up spaces to sleep, one evening’s work is what it took to make the First United Methodist Church in St. Augustine a sanctuary fit for more than a Sunday service.
The church opened overnight Thursday as St. Johns County’s only cold shelter of the week. Only Action News Jax had the opportunity to see how volunteers prepared the shelter to offer up a warm moment of safety ahead of a bitterly cold weekend.
“We don’t provide a lot of other than a warm place to spend the night and get out of the cold,” said Harry Ruhsam, St. Augustine’s cold shelter coordinator, who helped volunteers prepare the church.
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Ruhsam took us behind church doors and into the space where mats were laid out, blankets were prepared and a warm meal was made for the few dozen people who slept in the space to escape the cold.
Ruhsam said he started working on creating cold shelters in St. Augustine about a decade ago, but has struggled to find enough spaces willing to allow people experiencing homelessness to stay overnight.
“A lot of folks we get are long-term homeless, but sometimes we get that one or two that have just recently come on hard times. They’ve got nowhere to be,” Ruhsam said.
The church, as Ruhsam explained, can only be open as a cold shelter when the temperature drops below 40 degrees.
That’s why he told us the shelter could only be open one night this week before reopening again on Sunday night, though he said he wishes more could be done.
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“We don’t have a lot of facilities, we’re strictly church-based and volunteer-based,” said Ruhsam, “but if we can provide that shelter and give them some guidance the next morning, hopefully we can steer them in the right direction.”
Ruhsam said the shelter, when it’s open, typically sees about 30 people per night. He said more work is being done around the county to help those in need and wants to keep the shelter open as often as it’s needed.
“We’re helping our fellow man and that’s what drives me, and, I think, all the volunteers, because any one of us could find ourselves in the same situation,” Ruhsam said.
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