Local nonprofit Immerse Arkansas’s forthcoming youth shelter, The Station, will be a dedicated place for 18-to-24 year olds who are homeless or have aged out of the foster care system and lack resources to transition to a stable adulthood.
The shelter is under construction with a ribbon-cutting ceremony set for 10 a.m. Thursday, August 8, and Eric Gilmore, executive director of Immerse Arkansas, said he hopes to accept people into The Station by late August or early September.
“We’d love to have as many people as possible come out and help us celebrate the kind of milestone that this is for the community,” Gilmore said. “Everybody’s welcome.”
Located on Mary Street off of Asher Avenue in Little Rock, The Station cost $3.5 million to construct and includes 15 suites with private bathrooms, a shared kitchen and dining space, an outdoor recreation area, and office and therapy spaces.
The Station won’t be the first shelter for former foster youth, but Gilmore says it will be unique in that it provides every resident with their own room.
“If you don’t feel safe, you can’t heal, you can’t grow. So that was our number one priority, is something that felt safe, feels secure, feels like it’s got a sense of protection,” Gilmore said. “With that in mind, we set it up so that every young person has their own bedroom and bathroom.”
A common area, which Gilmore referred to as the “living hallway,” connects the 15 suites. Combining the use of natural light and artful lighting fixtures to create a space that feels both modern and welcoming, the living hallway will serve as a place for people to interact and work together.
“It feels like it invites the opportunity to dream beyond a young person’s current situation,” Gilmore said of the space.
A recent anonymous donation of $900,000 has fully financed the remaining construction, allowing Immerse to finish The Station debt-free. “We really didn’t want to go into a situation where we had to take out a loan. That’s just a tough thing for a nonprofit to do, and just creates a lot of weight,” Gilmore said. “We were thrilled when we found out that this donor wanted to make up that funding gap.”
Once The Station is open, young people can stay for about 60-90 days. In that time, residents will work with life coaches and therapists to start the healing process, find stable long-term housing and make a plan for the future, which looks different for every person depending on their situation and experiences.
“The goal is to do 24/7 admissions,” Gilmore said. “These are crisis situations, so [we] want to be able to meet that need.”
The vision for The Station, he said, started to form around 2012. “We had just been going a couple of years and we were like, ‘Oh man, we need a place where young people can immediately get off the streets when they need help,’” Gilmore said.
At the time, Gilmore and his wife, Kara, used houses and apartments to provide group housing for young people. “It’s really hard to take somebody who’s in a crisis and put them into some kind of group home,” Gilmore said. “It just wasn’t working.”
Gilmore said young people often end up at shelters “that do good work, but they’re typically designed for people in their 30s to their 50s.
“We just saw time and time again where people are getting sucked into things that were not good for them. They’re becoming further victims of abuse or exploitation, getting sucked into drugs, or getting into the mindset of being chronically homeless. Finally, with the help of a lot of people, we’re at the point where we can do something about it.”
The Station’s name is a reference to the story of a young woman the Gilmores cared for when they were working with teens in foster care in a group home. She inspired them to start Immerse Arkansas, they say.
“There’s this girl, Megan, who we cared a ton about. She came into foster care when she was 12,” Gilmore said. “Between the ages of 12 and 18 [she] just bounced around the system to 50 different placements.
“The day after her 18th birthday, her caseworker dropped her off at what used to be the Greyhound bus station in North Little Rock. She had one bag of clothes, one night’s worth of her bipolar medications, a one-way bus pass back to some family members she hadn’t seen since she was 12. And that was her launch into adulthood.
“We watched it happen and we just couldn’t look away. We knew we needed to do something.”
Immerse Arkansas has been working with young adults and children since 2010. In addition to Overcomer Central (The OC), Immerse opened a Conway location last year where “youth in crisis,” as Immerse calls them, can take a shower, do laundry, have a meal and learn life skills from mentors and coaches.
Mental health is a major component of the healing process at Immerse.
“When we were starting out, we defined the problem we were up against simply as beds. Like, there weren’t enough places for these young people to sleep in the state.” Gilmore said. “[We] quickly saw that wasn’t the right lens to look at this through. This is a problem of trauma, abuse and neglect.
“So, our whole orientation for our program is around healing. The mental health piece of that is so critical in that process.”
Immerse provides therapists to “create space for young people to start to process and understand what they’ve experienced and, at that same time, start to build a vision of their future and what they want for their life,” Gilmore said.
Janet Schweiger, a student at the Clinton School of Public Service, said she wouldn’t have been able to finish her undergraduate degree at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock without Immerse’s support. “Growing up, it was pretty rocky with my parents. It was kind of unstable and it wasn’t really a good environment,” Schweiger said. “I got kicked out of the house for deciding to go to college, which makes no sense.
“I was couch-surfing for a while during that. Then I lost my scholarship at school. I had to stay with friends and their parents and they heard about Immerse.”
Schweiger said the feeling of community and the staff at Immerse had a major impact on her life. “[My coach] was really, really good. She was really supportive and helped me figure out different things like health insurance,” Schweiger said. “And then I had a mentor, Haley. We’re still really close and I sort of consider her like my sister.”
Schweiger said she thinks The Station will make young people more receptive to the idea of receiving support from a shelter. “I feel like it’ll make people who were hesitant be more open to getting help,” Schweiger said. “Especially it being this type of community where you have your own space. You have your own bathroom and you have therapy and all this support around you.”
That’s not to say residents won’t experience obstacles, Schweiger said.
“It might suck for a little bit. You won’t get along with everyone,” Schweiger said. “But if you just do what you need to do and just have an open mind and try to see the positive in everything, you can accomplish whatever you want to. … I don’t think I would be stable without Immerse.” She has a full-time job at U.S. Pizza Co., and she’s going to school in pursuit of a career as a public servant.
“Right now I’m leaning towards some kind of advocacy work for foster care youth, homeless youth,” Schweiger said.
Learn more about The Station and Immerse Arkansas, and find volunteering opportunities, at immersearkansas.org.