Gulf Coast News recently reported on our efforts to organize local support for a low-barrier homeless shelter in Collier County. Watch the below interviews by reporter Alexa Velez with Bravo House resident Bruce Kennedy and Dale Mullin, Warrior Homes of Collier president.
A U.S. Army veteran in Collier County shared his journey from near homelessness to finding stability through temporary housing.
Bruce Kennedy lost his job and found himself struggling to make ends meet.”I lost my job at Naples Community Hospital, and after that, it was minimum wage security guard jobs. I couldn’t pay rent anymore. And, you know, my car broke down, and I couldn’t afford to get it fixed, so I couldn’t even work as security no more,” Kennedy said
With no other options, Kennedy ended up at a local shelter, where he lived for nine months. While grateful for the shelter, he wanted a space to call his own. The biggest challenge? Money.
“Stability is important. Not knowing for sure if you’re going to be able to come up with enough money for next month is a heavy burden,” Kennedy said. “Because I was allowed to live here and pay less rent than normal, I was able to keep up my car. Without it, with my arthritis, I’d be in a really difficult situation.”
Kennedy now lives at Bravo House in North Naples, a temporary housing facility run by Warrior Homes of Collier. The organization provides veterans with affordable housing while they save money for a more permanent solution. But Kennedy is one of the lucky ones—many veterans in Collier County have nowhere to go.
Dale Mullin, president and founder of Warrior Homes of Collier, says at least 20 veterans in the county are currently without shelter.
“That is something that in Collier County, most people are not aware of because they’re in the shadows, they hide. When I talk to groups about this problem of homelessness, they’ll say, well, I did not know we had homeless people in Collier County, a wealthy community like this,” said Mullin.
Many veterans don’t qualify for local shelters because they fail to meet the requirements, like sobriety, passing a background check, or having identification. Mullin believes the solution is a low-barrier housing model where veterans can get food and shelter without strict entry rules.
“Low-barrier housing has no restrictions. It brings people off the streets, out of the woods, out of their cars,” Mullin said. “It gives them a place where they can access food, shelter, and hygiene while working on a plan to get permanent housing and the help they need.”
The biggest challenge, according to Mullin, is getting the community on board and overcoming the “not in my backyard” mentality.
“It can be overcome. We are going to investigate. I really believe that probably the best course of action and success in making that happen is probably going to be involved with faith-based organizations, that’s probably where it’s going to happen,” said Mullin.
Now, Mullin is forming a committee with representatives from different local organizations to visit low-barrier facilities across the state. The goal is to learn from their models and bring a similar facility to Collier County in the near future
