I recently learned a new term. When I checked with Gerald Snell, our shelter manager during the recent freeze, he informed me that Gateway Rescue Mission was a “warming center” and that we had a shelter full of folks seeking shelter from the cold. I said “that’s great” and proceeded to privately google “warming center” to find out what my staff already knew.

Basically, a warming center is a place where people go to stay warm, get something to eat, grab a cup of coffee, etc., and seek protection from the cold. It’s good to know my staff is one step ahead of the game. This brings me to an important part of our ministry at Gateway Rescue Mission that often gets overlooked.

Nonprofit pundits have coined a cute phrase in recent years, saying rescue missions should focus on “outcomes rather than outputs.” This means we should focus on how many of our shelter guests move into permanent housing rather than focusing on how many people we shelter or how many meals we serve. That sounds good, as the “experts” lecture us on how today’s public wants to know in real numbers how many of our residents graduate from our recovery programs and get jobs, further their education, and are still sober one year after graduating from our New Life Program. Those are all excellent questions.

But these pundits, consultants, and non-profit think tank experts who like to get paid big bucks to tell the rest of us what we should be doing overlook a central point. It takes a significant amount of resources and energy to keep drugs out of our shelter; to make sure the blankets and sheets are clean each night; to make sure the schizophrenic gentleman standing in the corner knows when to go to our cafeteria for dinner. 

When our shelter staff stacks the chairs in our chapel to make room for extra mattresses on cold nights, that means an additional 15 people won’t have to sleep in the cold that night. That is an output, and the experts say we should stop focusing on outputs and work toward outcomes instead. 

It takes multiple layers of good staff members at Gateway Rescue Mission to keep our facilities drug free and to keep the bedbugs out of our shelter. I know of recovery programs in Jackson that are run by well-meaning people, but aren’t drug free because they lack the depth in good staff to keep the drugs out.

For the record, we are working to implement new facets into our recovery program to improve our outcomes so that our graduates will be qualified to land a decent job when they leave our program. Still, the skeptic in me wonders how many of the think-tank gurus who love to tell the front-line soldiers how to do their jobs have ever worked a night-shift at a homeless shelter. How many of these “experts” would have a clue what to do if a homeless person knocked on their office door seeking help?

It’s very possible that a homeless person is alive today because they stayed in our shelter when the temperatures dropped into the teens at night this past weekend. I’ll take that outcome.