CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The extreme cold temperatures can be deadly, especially if someone doesn't have a warm place to stay. That was especially true in Clarksville, where the need for a warming shelter was so great, a church had to step up at the last minute.
"Hey look, you don’t have to be out here in your tent, you don’t have to be out in your car," said Deborah Ashcraft, the Grace Assistance Program Director for Clarksville Area Urban Ministries. "It is so important for us to be able to shelter our unhoused friends."
Ashcraft said it didn't take long to realize there would be more people needing shelter than Clarksville nonprofits could handle. So she reached out to Rev. Harriet Bryan at Madison Street United Methodist Church. It was a little bit of a crazy idea — could they host a warming shelter with little notice?
"Without Madison Street United Methodist Church partnering with us, we wouldn’t be able to do this, and I firmly believe we would have lost some lives during this weather," said Ashcraft.
Deborah expected about 40 guests. Since Monday, the shelter has hosted more than 60 people and put several families with children in hotels.
"We feel like we’re saving lives and saving souls at the same time," she said.
Some of the guests at the shelter were recently displaced by the tornadoes that tore through Montgomery County.
"I had a young man reach out to me earlier that hadn’t eaten in three days," said Leonard Ellis Jr. with the nonprofit Mission Tennessee.
Mission Tennessee's original goal was to help with tornado relief, but then they realized they needed to pivot.
"We’re just grateful to be able to be a part of getting people’s lives back on the right track," he said.
The group has been furnishing a few of the shelter's hot lunches. That became a need once the shelter decided they had to stay open around the clock.
"Just because of the wind chill factor in the afternoon, and then at night it’s just brutal," said Ashcraft.
For Ashcraft, she thinks this is only proof that Clarksville is too big of a city to not have its own rescue mission.
"We need a building that we can have 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, where our homeless population can get all the services they need —mental health, doctors," she said. "We have just surpassed the amount of homeless individuals that our local nonprofits can really help."
Madison Street United Methodist Church is still in need of a few additional volunteers to fully staff the shelter through the end of this bitterly cold weekend. You cansign up here.
If you need a warming shelter elsewhere in Tennessee, you can find locations by clicking here.
There are still so many families in East Tennessee hurting following the floods from Hurricane Helene in September. That made this year's running of the Santa Train extra special for many families in the northeast part of the state. This special Santa Express has been making an annual run in part of Appalachia for over 80 years.
-Lelan Statom
