Columbia homeless shelter Room at the Inn is now providing a permanent home to the Saturday Morning Cafe, a weekly breakfast which has migrated between different churches for more than 15 years.
After breakfast, the shelter, which typically closes each morning before opening again at night, will remain open throughout the day.
It’s not the first service that’s been folded into 1609 Ashley St. Loaves and Fishes began offering dinner services there in 2024. Like Loaves and Fishes, which was previously hosted out of the Wilkes Boulevard United Methodist Church, the Saturday Morning Cafe outgrew the churches that were hosting it.
“Pre-pandemic, a big Saturday for us would be maybe like 80 people or so, and last year, we were some Saturdays like 150 people,” said Gretchen Rohrs, who coordinates the Saturday Cafe out of the Calvary Episcopal Church. “It was becoming overwhelming for our church facility to host that many guests.”
After deciding to take them in, Room at the Inn Executive Director John Trapp said it made sense to stay open the rest of the day — something he’d been wanting to do for a while.
“During the winter, there has traditionally been no place for folks to go on Saturday, so we were hoping to start Saturday all-day operations before it got cold,” he said.
The move offers a preview of the Opportunity Campus — a one-stop-shop for homeless services currently under construction and expected to be completed by next spring.
“The plan was already in place for the services to coalesce there,” Trapp said. “We're just pushing it ahead a little bit so it will make the transition to the Opportunity Campus easier when it happens.”
July 5th was the first Saturday the shelter hosted the cafe and had all-day operations. The breakfast — eggs, biscuits, gravy and casserole and more— was an upgrade from the usual early-morning snacks like cereal and fruit.
Even more appreciated by guests was the refuge from the heat.
“It is absolutely miserable, plays heck with our bodies” Miranda Herndon said. “It just makes everything that much harder and gross, everything's sweaty.”
The temperature climbed to the high 80s that afternoon.
“We need a day where we don't get shoved out and have to carry all of our stuff on our back all over town, it's exhausting” she said.
Trapp opened a fundraiser to pay for the additional staffing needed for the full-day. He received support from the community, including faith groups and businesses, but didn’t reach the fundraising goal.
“We've raised about half of our goal of $15,000 which is great,” Trapp said. “So we're good for the next three, four months, even if we don't raise any more.”
Trapp said Saturday’s are still short-staffed, and he’s covering one shift himself.
“Last winter, I was downtown on a Saturday and found people huddled in an alley, cold,” he said. “I didn't really have a good suggestion of where they could go, so I told them I would work on something.”
