By Rita McInerney

Since it opened in December, 1982, St. Bartholomew's Family Shelter has been giving homeless families "an experience of human caring."

Now, six years later, the non-profit shelter is expanding its ministry to parents and children forced by circumstances onto the streets of Atlanta. On Sunday, Nov. 6, ground was broken for a new shelter building which will incorporate a World War II wooden barracks with a new addition. The barracks on the LaVista Road site was the original church for the congregation in 1952.

The shelter sponsored by St. Bartholomew's was the first for families in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Now, according to the current list supplied by the Task Force for the Homeless, there are 11 family shelters in Fulton, DeKalb, Douglas and Gwinnett counties.

According to Martha Evans, co-director who has served the shelter since its first night, the barracks will be gutted and the new structure added on. When complete, the 12,000 square-foot shelter will have 14 guestrooms, seven baths, two of them wheelchair accessible. It will be open year-round, 24 hours a day.

While their homeless guests will be more comfortable in the new shelter, the quality of care and concern from volunteers and team leaders who serve them requires no expansion.

Mrs. Evans said a core group of about 40 people assist her and co-director Jim Eason in running the shelter. They come from the congregation at St. Bartholomew's and the nine churches participating in the shelter.

Immaculate Heart of Mary Church on Briarcliff Road, is one of the shelter's sister parishes. Ben Richardson, coordinator for IHM, said the parish contributed $5,000 to the fund drive for the addition, while individual parishioners made private gifts. Some, Mrs. Evans had mentioned earlier, were substantial.

Richardson said the parish, involved for several years, has been assigned four weeks when its members will provide the food, people to serve the meal, and two people to spend the night.

"A parish of our size should be able to handle 15 weeks," Richardson commented.

There are approximately 100 parishioners taking part in the IHM shelter effort. The seven leaders seek volunteers from among the various ministries at the large parish; the Eucharistic ministers, lectors, youth and young married groups among others.

The parish St. Vincent de Paul is called upon from time to time to fill special needs. Joe Grno, parish conference president, said the group has been able to help when a family needs money to deposit on an apartment or for medical assistance. SVDP members also counsel these families, one of the varied areas in which shelter resources are called into play to help mend fragmented lives.

The connection with St. Bartholomew's, Richardson said, is "very positive. It has given us an opportunity to be involved in social action." Both he and Mary Anne Johnson, another IHM member, serve on the board of the incorporated family shelter.

Mrs. Evans said the addition became possible when a $250,000 HUD grant was awarded, contingent upon matching funds. A fund drive raised the needed $250,000. Gifts were received from the nine participating churches, private foundations, and through several festivals sponsored by the St. Bartholomew congregation. The Rev. Chester J. Grey, III, is rector of the church which has approximately 400 families on its rolls.

That first winter of 1982-83, Mrs. Evans recalled, the shelter was open four months. "We did it all ourselves. There was a core of about 12 people. We had five families."

Looking ahead to the second year, "We knew we would open again but we knew we couldn't do it by ourselves." Thankfully, Holy Trinity Episcopal in Decatur was "extremely involved," she said. The shelter stayed open six months the second year. Since then it has been open eight-and-a-half months each year.

Shelter rules are simple, Mrs. Evans said. Families are allowed to stay for 30 days. At the end of that time, a committee evaluation determines what happens next. "If they're working, trying to get their act together, we let them stay" until they have the resources to live on their own.

Each family, sometimes they span three generations, is sheltered in a Sunday school classroom which opens off the round parish hall. The shelter opens at 6 p.m., dinner is served at 7, lights out are at 10 and a light breakfast is served at 6 a.m. before the guests must leave for the day. They are provided Marta tokens for their day's travel.

"This is the first time we've had all school-age children," Mrs. Evans remarked. "They attend Briar Vista. It's a wonderful school, really good to the kids. Sometimes it's hard taking in children for short periods."

The shelter works in cooperation with the DeKalb County government and board of health, Family and Children's Services, Economic Opportunity Atlanta. Money is received from Episcopal charities as well as from some of the participating parishes which include the shelter in their annual budgets.

Somehow, Mrs. Evans marveled, the needs are always answered. When the shelter first opened, no one thought of the need for high-chairs. But "the next night, when we came back, two high chairs were standing by the door. That's the way it's been all along."

Among donors is an elderly woman who sends her anonymous gift of five dollars regularly. Her note with the first donation simply said, "I want to be a part of what you are doing."

A member of St. Bartholomew's congregation who volunteers, Arlene DeBevoise, has written in her reflections on the shelter that it "does not necessarily solve problems, but it gives guests an experience of human caring that can be a light to steer into the future by. A future, if they make it, in which they may remember that, in Atlanta, GA, in such-and-such a year, St. Bartholomew's Church gave me and my family food, a room, a bath -- and a little hope."