Shelter Celebrates Full Year Of Changing Lives

by Thomas Breen The New Haven independent

Travis Gray: “Keep digging it.”

Jason Carasone: “Here they go beyond,” making sure clients have food, clean clothes, and support to find a place to work and live.

“We are not treated like homeless people here,” Jason Carasone said on Friday in front of a room filled with top city officials, social service providers, clergy, community healthcare workers, and fellow New Haveners with nowhere else to go. “We are treated like men.”

Travis Gray said the same. “Keep digging it,” he told the passionate crew behind Upon This Rock Ministries, which has run the 75-bed men’s homeless shelter at 645 Grand Ave for exactly one year. “The effort that everyone puts forward [at this shelter] is very important,” and does not go unnoticed. “We don’t want to disappoint anyone.”

Carasone, 52, and Gray, 48, are both currently staying at the revived Grand Avenue shelter near Hamilton Street. Both New Haven natives, Carasone’s been there for two weeks, Gray for around two months.

On Friday morning, Carasone and Gray took turns at the front of the room as part of a speaking program to celebrate Upon This Rock’s one-year anniversary of bringing this shelter — previously operated by Emergency Shelter Management Service, and closed during the pandemic — back to life.

Upon This Rock Ministries, a local Christian organization that the city has contracted to operate multiple warming centers in recent years, bought the single-story commercial building at 645 Grand Ave. from Immanuel Baptist Church’s Emergency Shelter Management Service in March 2024 for $475,000. In August 2024, alders approved allocating $500,000 to help Upon This Rock revive the 645 Grand shelter, with case management and healthcare services on site. And the shelter opened its doors to its first clients on Oct. 17, 2024.

Each speaker, from Mayor Justin Elicker to city Community Services Administrator Eliza Halsey to Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller to Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen Executive Director Steve Werlin, testified to the monumental transformation that Upon This Rock Pastor Valerie Washington and her team have brought to this once benighted shelter spot.

“This place looks so different. It just looks incredible,” Elicker said about the space that offers not just 75 beds and a bathroom and shower, but also laundry services, a computer and WiFi, resume building and job support, overdose prevention and conflict management classes, mental health and substance recovery groups, and twice-a-week on-site medical services — including cancer prevention and, soon, diabetes prevention programs — thanks to Fair Haven Community Health Care.

“I have sent people here” and seen their lives changed, Miller said after embracing Washington as a fellow “get-shit-done” kind of person. This shelter is a “testament to your amazing dedication and refusal to be knocked down.”

Speakers at Friday’s celebration and a slideshow displayed on a screen mounted to one of the shelter’s walls spoke to the impact the shelter has had over the past year.

The shelter — which serves adult men, and requires them to be at the site by a 10 p.m. curfew in order to sleep in one of the site’s beds — served a total of 381 individuals in its first year. (The shelter started as having a 60-day stay limit; it’s now increased that limit to 90 days.) It’s had 66 “permanent exits” among clients who did not come back to the shelter because they found housing or work; 104 “temporary” exits; and only 7 “homeless exits.” It’s seen ten people leave for full-time jobs and six for part-time jobs. It’s seen only two non-fatal overdoses, and zero fatal overdoses.

And it’s partnered with United Way, the Community Foundation, the city Economic Development agency, Bank of America, Goodwill, Midwest Food Bank, Town Fair Tire Foundation, the city’s Department of Community Resilience, the MATCH manufacturing training program, a host of different churches and faith communities, and Fair Haven Health, among others.

“We are a community dedicated to serving others,” Washington said as she described her church’s path from opening its first warming center in 2022 to buying the Grand Avenue shelter building in 2024 and then opening a full-on shelter with wraparound services.

Gray said that this shelter has been a critically supportive resource for him as he works to get his life on track and tries to reunite with his children. “It’s been challenging,” he said about being homeless in New Haven for the past roughly six years. He said he and the other clients at Upon This Rock are always treated with respect and dignity; he praised not just the myriad social services provided to clients, but also the chores that the shelter has the men do, including taking out the trash and sweeping the floor.

“This is a blessing,” Carasone said about the shelter. “Hopefully, one day this will end,” he said about being homeless in New Haven. Places like Upon This Rock make that future seem a bit more possible.

Delana Lawrence, who runs the Grand Avenue shelter site for Upon This Rock, held back tears as she described her own history as a homeless 15-year-old in New Haven who managed to graduate from high school and get a job in the medical field,. She retired from that job last year, and now works full time for Upon This Rock.

“To be able to give back, it’s amazing. … I am truly grateful to be here today,” she said. She described this stretch of Grand Avenue — where Upon This Rock also has a church building at 884 Grand — as “Kingdom Boulevard.” And she spoke about just how much work she and her team put in to run the 24/7 shelter with the goal of helping those most in need.

“We don’t call them the homeless population,” Lawrence said. “We call them our extended family.”

The private sleeping area in the back of the building.

The Upon This Rock team, getting a round of applause for their work.

Alder Miller and Pastor Washington. 645 Grand.