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Winter Homeless Shelter In Wichita Closes For Season

Courtesy Inter-Faith Ministries

Dozens of homeless men and women in Wichita will need to find a new place to stay at night now that a winter-season shelter has closed for the year.

Inter-Faith Ministries opens the Warming Souls Winter Shelter each November and offers homeless men and women overnight accommodations during the five coldest months of the year. The emergency shelter closed for the season on Friday.

Carolyn Kell of Inter-Faith Ministries says despite this year’s mild weather, the number of people using the shelter remained steady.

"Even when we were having those gorgeous 75 days in February, we were still having 100 people at the shelter at night so we absolutely discovered that people do really want a nice, warm, safe, dry place to stay," she says.

Men stay at the Inter-Faith Ministries Spiritual Center at 841 N. Market Street in downtown Wichita. Women have been housed at Safe Haven at 841 N. Broadway. The shelter also provided dinner and breakfast meals.

Kell says they’re working to find a new location for women to stay next year because the program is outgrowing the space that’s available in the current facility.

“The facility where we’ve had that the past two years, it’s simply too much for that building,” she says. “There’s not enough room for the women and it’s a strain on the plumbing and other parts of the building.”

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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar.

To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.