When we picture being unhoused, we most often picture the absence of a roof. However, ask anyone who has lived through this experience, and you’ll hear about a different loss first: the loss of being known by the community. The loss of the mailman waving as they drop off a birthday card, of fellow community members who look at you and not through you. This is the loss we are speaking about. A home is the quiet infrastructure that holds a person within a web of relationships, and when it disappears, that web frays with it.

This is the first piece in our blog series this month, and it begins with a question worth sitting with: What does it mean to be part of a community when you have no home? The answer reshapes the understanding of Nest’s actual role in our community and beyond.

Belonging Is A Basic Need

Human beings are wired for connection, so much so that our brains evolved to expect the presence of others. Our ancestors depended on one another to meet their most basic needs. That biological need to connect has not gone away, even in an age when technology lets us live in near-total isolation.

The importance of connection for survival is well-supported by evidence. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory states that lacking social ties can increase the risk of early death, comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily. This is the part most people miss when looking at our unhoused population as purely a housing problem. Belonging sits alongside food, water, and shelter on the list of things a human being needs to survive and function. It is not a reward people earn once they are stable. It is part of what makes stability possible in the first place.

What Gets Lost When Home Is Gone

Losing a home strips away far more than walls; it removes the social scaffolding most of us never notice because we have never had to live without it. There is no longer a kitchen to host a friend, no stable address to receive a letter, no reliable place to be reached or visited.

Researchers who study the situation of being unhoused describe it not only as a housing crisis but as a crisis of disconnection. Being unhoused involves the loss of stable housing, social support networks, and a sense of belonging within a community, all at once. The losses compound one another. Relationship breakdown is frequently a precursor to becoming unhoused, and isolation deepens throughout the experience itself.

There is also the weight of being treated as invisible, and the hurt that comes with it. People living unhoused frequently describe feeling abandoned by society, mistrusted, and shunned, which leads many to withdraw further. The longer someone is unseen, the harder it becomes to believe they belong anywhere at all. Isolation can become a trap, making it even harder to find the way back into the community.

How We Build Belonging

Shelter is infrastructure, the foundation that enables reconnection to the community. Sheltering provides a consistent place to return to, with staff who learn your name and notice when a guest is not there. Reintegrating our guests back into the community is our mission.

This is the work we’ve been doing for 25 years. Providing beds, meals, connections to services, and most importantly, providing a place where our guests are treated as part of our community. This is the difference between being alone out on the street and being greeted by name, having somewhere stable enough for relationships to form, and being met with dignity rather than suspicion is a key part of the rehousing journey.

When a guest has a reliable place to be, they can begin rebuilding the routines and relationships that being unhoused disrupted. They have a place where they can be reached, where they are remembered, and most importantly, we demonstrate that they belong in our community. This is our mission in action: to reconnect our guests with their community because belonging is a fundamental human need.

Coming home is also connecting back to the community

The woman at the beginning of our post, with the photo in her wallet, is representative and not an actual person; this story illustrates the loss of belonging. At Nest, helping her home means more than finding her four walls; it means rebuilding her place among others.

Community is not something you receive only after you finally have a home. It is part of how people find their way home. Over the coming weeks, this series will explore what this looks like in practice: the specific ways belonging is rebuilt and the people who are finding their way back to it. We hope you’ll follow along.

The post Belonging Without an Address: What Community Means When You Do Not Have A Home appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Hunger is Ageless

A study completed in 2024 by the United States Department of Agriculture, released in December of 2025, and later published by Children’s Watch, found that “18.4% of households with children experienced food insecurity at some point in 2024—meaning 14.1M children didn’t have access to enough food for an active, healthy life sometime in 2024.” These are children experiencing hunger. We know that there is a direct connection between mental and physical well-being and access to healthy foods and a balanced diet. While a balanced diet is important at any age, it is especially true for children. In households where food insecurity is present, often adults and caregivers bear the brunt of this. Parents will often go without, giving the little food available to their children. This situation creates further instability for the adults who are responsible for providing stable housing for children in the home. When the body is properly nourished, things like being functional at work, remaining healthy enough to work, and being mentally healthy become much more difficult for the adults involved.

 Food Resources for Local Children

As times have changed, schools and organizations across the country have realized that summer can be especially dangerous for children without access to regular, healthy meals. Many schools, including those in La Porte County, and partner organizations are working to support those in need by providing food for school-aged children. Below is a list of organizations that offer food assistance to school-aged children.

Programs and services

• Michigan City Area Schools Summer Food Service Program — free meals for all kids 18 and under, no registration; full site list, dates, and times. Questions: MCAS Food Service Operations, (219) 873-2131.
• La Porte Community School Corporation Summer Meals — free breakfast and lunch for all kids 18 and under, eaten on site:
  • Handley (June 2–26): Breakfast 8:30–9:00 AM, Lunch 11:45 AM–12:15 PM
  • Kingsford Heights (June 2–26): Lunch 10:45–11:15 AM
  • LaPark (June 2–26): Lunch 12:00–12:30 PM
  • Kesling (June 15–26 & July 6–17): Breakfast 8:30–9:00 AM, Lunch 11:45 AM–12:15 PM
• USDA Summer Meals Site Finder — find any open site by address; text “Summer Meals” to 914-342-7744 or visit fns.usda.gov/summer/sitefinder.
• Summer EBT — grocery benefits for eligible families with school-age children during the summer; USDA Summer Food info.
• Food 4 Kids Backpack Program (Food Bank of Northern Indiana) — free weekend/break food for eligible K–6 students in LaPorte County; program page.
• Food Bank of Northern Indiana mobile distributions — groceries brought directly into La Porte County neighborhoods; feedindiana.org.
• Center Township Trustee’s Office — emergency assistance for La Porte residents, including help with food. https://centertownshiplaporte.com/

We encourage you to bookmark and share this post widely. Whether a family needs a meal site this week, grocery assistance this month, or a place to turn in a crisis, the resources are here. Let’s make sure every kid in our community knows where the next meal is coming from. Also, if you’d like us to add a resource to this list, please contact us at communications@nestcommunityshelter.org.

Summer should mean worry-free fun for kids, not hunger. Every program listed exists because our neighbors decided no child in La Porte County should go without a meal when school lets out.

Community Support Keeps Families Fed and Housed

Food insecurity does not discriminate by age, race, or gender. When funds become so scarce that food insecurity becomes commonplace, it can indicate that becoming unhoused is a real possibility. While this is not always the case, a report in the Journal of Housing Economics published an article about the connection between being unhoused and food insecurity, stating that, “families straining to stay fed will sometimes forego rent or mortgage payments in order to have enough to eat, which in turn increases the likelihood of eviction.” As a community, let’s share these resources and break the connection where we can, keep bellies full, and families housed.

The post Summer Meal Programs for La Porte County Families: Breaking the Connection between Hungry and Unhoused appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Food Insecurity Is a Health Problem

Feeding America defines food insecurity as, “Food insecurity is when people can’t access the food they need to live their fullest lives. There are many causes of food insecurity. But one thing is clear: financial security for everyone is the most effective way to end hunger.” More simply put, food insecurity is a lack of access to enough nutritious food to properly nourish the body. For someone with a chronic condition such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, or an autoimmune disorder, food insecurity is especially dangerous. When meals are skipped, low-quality, or unpredictable, blood sugar swings, blood pressure rises, and inflammation increases.

Research shows food insecurity is directly linked to higher A1C levels and is associated with not having enough food and/ or not having access to nutritious foods, according to The National Diabetes Association.

Multiple sources also cite that people who are food insecure are far more likely to skip doses, split pills, or stop filling prescriptions because they must choose between paying for food and paying for medicine. Without enough nutritious food, health issues compound quickly. These health issues compound, leading to the need for medical treatment and resulting in medical bills that stress already tight budgets. Once again, this situation compounds.

Being Unhoused Speeds Up Physical Decline

When you stack being unhoused on top of hunger, the toll on the body accelerates.

In a recent study of adults experiencing homelessness in California, 45% reported fair or poor physical health, 60% had one or more chronic health conditions, and more than a third had difficulty with daily tasks like bathing, dressing, or walking, according to the California Health Care Foundation. We know that being unhoused takes an enormous toll on the body, both physically and mentally.

According to the National Institutes of Health, mortality rates among people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. are 4.5 to 9.6 times higher than those of the general population. A 2025 study published in The Lancet Public Health found that people experiencing homelessness in Denmark lose an average of about 15 years of life compared to the general population, 15.9 years for men and 15.3 years for women.

How the Compounding Continues

When an individual loses stable housing. They lose a kitchen, and therefore they cannot prepare the meals their doctor recommended or maintain proper nutrition. Available food is often prepackaged, not fresh fruits, meats, cheese, or vegetables. This prepackaged food is mostly classified as junk food – chips, crackers, candy, etc. Without a refrigerator, insulin cannot be stored safely, nor can eggs, meat, or dairy be stored for later use. The first domino falls- nutrition.

Without stable housing, sleep becomes difficult, whether couch surfing, sleeping in one’s car, camping, or sleeping in a shelter. Simply put, sleep falls apart, and poor sleep alone raises blood pressure and blood sugar. Stress hormones remain elevated throughout the day. It is also widely known that sleep directly impacts mood and can impact mental health. Another domino falls-

With a lack of adequate food, an underlying health condition, and a lack of sleep, an illness gets worse. The person ends up in the emergency room, which is the most expensive form of care and the least equipped to manage a long-term condition. They are discharged back into the same conditions that landed them there. The cycle repeats, degrading the individual’s health each time.

Why It Affects Employment

The piece of this that gets the least attention is also one of the most important: employment.

It is very hard to interview for a job, hold a shift, or learn a new skill when you are hungry, in pain, sleep-deprived, and managing an uncontrolled chronic illness. The conditions of homelessness are the same conditions that make it hardest to get out of homelessness. That is the spiral. This is where this all compounds and can trap those who do not know how to navigate or have the support to find their way out.

What Actually Breaks the Cycle

A shelter bed alone does not fix this. A visit to a food pantry alone does not fix this. What works is meeting all three needs at once: housing, food, and access to consistent healthcare. Bringing those pieces together, people stabilize, and chronic conditions become manageable. Sleep improves, stress drops, and work becomes possible again.

That is the work we do every day in coordination with our partners in Michigan City and across La Porte County; we stop the spiral and support stability. Food, housing, and healthcare are not separate problems. They are the same problem, and we treat them as such.

If you want to be part of the response in our community, donate food, time, and resources to help those in need find their way out of the spiral and back to stability.

The post Hungry and Unhoused: A Compounding Situation appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

The Tipping Point

For anyone living paycheck to paycheck, every cent is accounted for. Rent, utilities, the phone bill, and the water bill are all set costs each month. Every dollar earned is allocated to these bills. Now, what happens if the car breaks down, someone in the household needs to visit the doctor, or even worse, there’s a reduction in hours at work or a job loss? What is the first bill that can get cut from that list? Often, none of the ones listed, so the food budget is where things begin to get left off.

Anti-hunger advocates have a phrase for this: “rent eats first.” When a paycheck runs short, families pay the rent, then the lights, then they figure out what’s left for groceries. The Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), a national policy and research organization, reports that about 10.4 million renter households are now spending half or more of their income on housing, which leaves families without adequate resources to pay for food. The Harvard Joint Center research through the FRAC goes on to say that the most severely cost-burdened renters spent 38 percent less on food and 70 percent less on health care than their peers who are not cost-burdened.

How One Issue Becomes Another

A family struggling to pay rent cuts their grocery bill, maybe skipping meals or feeding only the children, living on the bare minimum to keep a roof over their heads. Without proper nutrition, health declines, and work attendance suffers. When work suffers, income drops. When income drops, rent becomes harder to pay, and eviction proceedings begin. Without the funds to fight the eviction or make up past rent plus fees, housing is lost.

A family that has already lost housing faces the same situation in reverse. Without a kitchen, food costs more and offers less nutrition. Without a refrigerator, groceries cannot be stored. Without a stable address, applying for SNAP benefits and other assistance becomes significantly harder. Food insecurity deepens, and with it, the physical and mental health conditions that make returning to stable housing even harder.

In a study published in Preventive Medicine Reports, the link between food insecurity and health outcomes in unhoused adults found that food insecurity is associated with self-rated poor health, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. A separate analysis of national health survey data published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that adults with food insecurity had more than three times the odds of co-occurring depression and cardiometabolic disease, such as diabetes or heart disease, when compared with food-secure adults.

The American Psychiatric Association summarizes the mental health impact simply: food insecurity is directly linked to depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders, and it exacerbates the physiological and psychological effects of existing mental health conditions.

Hunger changes the body and the brain, and shrinks a person’s capacity to navigate their way out of a crisis. Food is not a nice-to-have; it is a basic human need.

Where To Get Help In Michigan City

If you or someone you know needs help with food assistance, we have many organizations in our community that provide it. The following pantries and soup kitchens serve residents of Michigan City and LaPorte County. Hours may change, so please call ahead. Information was verified against the Food Bank of Northern Indiana directory and a WNDU-compiled regional list published in November 2025.

Sacred Heart Food Pantry at St. Mary 10th and Buffalo Streets, Michigan City Wednesdays: 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Fridays: 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. (the only pantry in Michigan City with evening hours). Also offers cleaning supplies, hygiene items, and over-the-counter medications.

Salvation Army Michigan City Food Pantry 1201 S. Franklin Street, Michigan City (219) 874-6885 Tuesdays and Thursdays: 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Serves residents in the Michigan City School District.

Arise and Shine Food and Outreach Center 1010 W. Garfield Street, Michigan City Food pantry hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Also offers a weekly free hot breakfast and a community clothing closet.

Trinity Episcopal Church Food Pantry 600 Franklin Square, Michigan City (219) 874-4355 Every other Wednesday: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Serves residents of LaPorte County.

Citizens Concerned for the Homeless Mobile Food Distribution. Call 1-219-809-9903. To find out when and where the mobile distribution site is happening, you can visit their Facebook page for more information.

Faith City Assembly Food Pantry 1314 S. Woodland Avenue, Michigan City (219) 872-6235 Tuesdays: 9:30 a.m. to noon.

Macedonia Baptist Missionary Church Pantry and Soup Kitchen 3007 Ohio Street, Michigan City (219) 874-2221 Every other Friday: 9 a.m. to noon.

First Presbyterian Church Soup Kitchen, 121 W. 9th Street, Michigan City, (219) 879-4501. Saturdays: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

First United Methodist Church Soup Kitchen, 121 E. 7th Street, Michigan City, (219) 872-7200. Mondays and Thursdays: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

New Disciple Love Fellowship Soup Kitchen 1411 Pine Street, Michigan City (219) 879-3268 Tuesdays: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

For residents elsewhere in LaPorte County, the Pax Center in LaPorte and the Community Food Pantry of Galena, Hudson, Kankakee, and Wills Township in Rolling Prairie are additional resources.

The connection between an empty pantry and an empty apartment is real, and the earlier the intervention, the better the outcome.

The post How Food Insecurity Can Directly Lead to Becoming Unhoused appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

This is the first piece in a month-long series exploring food insecurity through the lens of our unhoused neighbors in our community. Food insecurity is commonly discussed these days. Homelessness is talked about. But the specific, daily experience of trying to feed yourself when you have no address, no kitchen, and nowhere to store what you can’t eat right now is where the gap in our public understanding tends to live.

The hidden requirement for almost every food resource

Journey through the common food assistance programs in any community, including ours, and you’ll see something many overlook: almost all programs automatically assume the recipient has a home, and this is only if they manage to qualify for assistance.

SNAP benefits load onto a card, but the program is built around the idea that you’ll buy groceries and take them somewhere to prepare. Food pantries hand out boxes of rice, pasta, dried beans, canned vegetables, and frozen meat, staples that require a stove, a pot, a can opener, refrigeration, and time. WIC vouchers, school meal backpack programs, and even many holiday food drives are designed for households that can store, cook, and serve.

For someone sleeping in a car, a tent, or a friend’s garage, or moving between couches, that bag of groceries isn’t a meal. It’s a logistics problem. Where do they keep the milk? How do they cook the chicken? What do they do with the rice and dried beans when you don’t have a pot, a burner, or running water? How do they carry three days’ worth of food when you’re already carrying everything you own?

The result is a strictly limited diet that someone without a kitchen can prepare.

What “accessible food” looks like

When we strip away storage and preparation, the food landscape narrows fast for our unhoused neighbors. What’s left must either be eaten immediately, be shelf-stable, or won’t spoil in a backpack on a hot day.

In practice, that often means gas-station food or dollar-store-type snacks, or fast food from the value menu when someone has a few dollars. Securing food often looks like free coffee and a pastry at a church drop-in or a hot meal at a soup kitchen if the timing and location work out. It can also be whatever a passerby hands over, or what a pantry offers in the form of “grab-and-go” bags. These bags typically consist of granola bars, peanut butter crackers, chips, fruit cups, and bottled water.

The majority of these foods satisfy immediate hunger, but they don’t address the longer-term nutritional problems created by this type of diet. These foods are, almost without exception, high in sodium and sugar, low in fiber and fresh produce, and engineered for shelf life rather than for health.

The harsh reality is that those most reliant on this food are often the least able to afford the health impacts eating this way brings. Conditions like diabetes, hypertension, dental problems, and many others that demand careful dietary management don’t stop when someone loses their housing. A diabetic without access to a refrigerator can’t store insulin properly or make a meal plan to keep sugar levels correct. Similarly, someone with high blood pressure can’t easily avoid sodium, as most available calories come from processed and packaged foods. Think about the last time you were near a grocery store checkout, in a gas station, or at a dollar store. What food choices were there near the till? Chances are, most were snack-type foods that offer little nutritional value.

The dignity that no one talks about

There’s a piece of this that doesn’t show up in statistics, and it matters: eating without a home is almost always public.

There’s no closing the kitchen door. No sitting down at a table with the people you love. No quiet moment to enjoy what you’re eating. Meals happen on benches, in parking lots, in line, or in a shelter like Nest.

For families, the weight is heavier. Parents experiencing homelessness work extraordinarily hard to shield their children from the reality of where their next meal will come from. They give up their own portions, ration, and schedule their day around free meal sites, the way other parents schedule their day around school pickup. The mental load of feeding a family without a kitchen is enormous, and it’s invisible to almost everyone who isn’t carrying it.

Why this series, and why now

Over the next month, we’re going to walk through this topic piece by piece. We’ll look at the specific barriers that prevent people experiencing homelessness from accessing the food assistance that technically exists for them. We’ll talk about the health consequences of long-term reliance on shelf-stable food, and what our community is doing, and could be doing, to close the gap. We’ll share what we see every day at Nest, and what our guests have taught us about this topic. Lastly, we’ll share the resources available in our community for those in need.

We’re beginning with this piece because it sets the landscape of this conversation. When someone has no address, food insecurity isn’t just about a lack of food. It’s about lacking everything needed to eat properly: a place to store it, the means to prepare it, a calm moment to eat, and the stability to plan beyond just the next hour.

Follow along as we highlight the connections, roadblocks, and the impact that food insecurity has on our unhoused community.

The post When Hunger Has No Address: Food Insecurity for Our Unhoused Neighbors appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Twenty-five years ago, two special women rallied our community to ensure no one had to sleep outside in the elements, and Interfaith PADS was born in 2001. At the time, our PADS program, which rotated through local churches, was the beginning of what would become Nest Community Shelter: a year-round shelter, a cold-weather emergency site serving a neighboring community, and a permanent path home for hundreds of men, women, and families across Northwest Indiana.

Twenty-five years of meals served, a safe place to rest weary heads, doors opened, lives reconnected because of our community, partners, volunteers, and supporters.

We want to celebrate this milestone with you.

The Nest Community Shelter’s 25th Anniversary Gala is an evening of dinner, a program, fundraising, celebrating, dancing, and a community gathering to honor a quarter-century of service and to fuel the next chapter.

•  Friday, September 18, 2026
• Purdue University Northwest, Westville Campus
• Dinner, program, and celebration

This gala is more than a fundraiser. It’s a thank-you to every volunteer, donor, partner, and neighbor who built Nest alongside us, and it’s our single most important fundraising event of the year. Every ticket purchased and every sponsorship secured directly funds shelter beds, hot meals, case management, and reconnection services that turn a crisis into a path home.

This evening is for anyone who believes our neighbors deserve dignity, safety, and a way home. Longtime supporters, first-time guests, business leaders, faith communities, families, and friends, we invite you to join us for an event 25 years in the making.

How to Join Us

Reserve your tickets. Individual seats and tables of ten are available now. Bring your people. Tables go quickly.

 Become a sponsor. Sponsorship opportunities at every level put your name and values in front of hundreds of community leaders while directly supporting our mission. Multiple tiers are available, from community supporters to presenting sponsors. Email us at communications@nestcommunityshelter.org to learn more, or click the button below.

Twenty-five years ago, this community decided that no neighbor should go without shelter. That decision built Nest. On September 18, we’re asking you to make the same decision for the next twenty-five years.

Save your seat. Sponsor a table. Bring a friend. We can’t wait to celebrate with you.

The post Join Us For the Nest Community Shelter 25th Anniversary Gala appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

We started this series with the true price tag of homelessness, the scattered costs that rarely appear on any single line item but add up across a community every day. We looked at what happens when someone calls 911 instead of walking into a shelter, and how that one call triggers a chain of expensive responses. We put shelter and the street side by side, as a cost comparison, and the math was not close; shelters save communities money. We explained what wraparound services do and why they cost so much less when they operate within a community than when they do not. We also spent time inside the revolving door of the hospital emergency room, where the same people return again and again because the emergency room becomes a de facto shelter when no other shelter is available.

This series has demonstrated how Nest is community infrastructure. Like every piece of infrastructure that holds a community together, Nest saves Michigan City money and saves its lives.

Healthy Communities have Support for Our Unhoused Neighbors

A community without a functioning shelter still faces the same crises. Those crises do not disappear. They migrate into emergency rooms, police dispatch, jails, courts, child welfare offices, and the public sanitation budget. Every one of those systems costs more per person than shelter does on a nightly basis. Researchers have documented this pattern in city after city, and the conclusion is consistent. According to research compiled by Community Solutions, longer stays in homelessness produce escalating costs that exceed the cost of simply providing housing and support. Shelter is the more affordable option. It also produces better outcomes for those involved.

Every dollar donated versus every dollar saved

Donors often ask a version of the same question. What does my gift actually do? The honest answer is that it does two things at once. It keeps a neighbor safe, keeps the community’s emergency systems from incurring costs several times larger than the gift itself, and supports a life getting back on track.

Research on supportive housing programs has repeatedly found that once someone is stably housed, emergency room costs drop by 61 percent and inpatient hospitalizations by 77 percent, according to the website Greendoors.

This is the return on shelter. This is not theoretical; it is documented in study after study across decades in communities of every size.

What this looks like in Michigan City

Every night someone sleeps safely with us at Nest is a night when a local emergency room is not treating preventable injuries, a night when a police officer is not running the same welfare check for the third time this month, and a night when a child is not sleeping in a car behind a gas station on U.S. 20. Every client meeting with a case manager is a conversation that makes the next call to 911 less likely. Every resident who moves from our shelter to stable housing stops drawing on the most expensive corners of the public safety budget and starts contributing to the local economy.

These are not separate outcomes. They are the same outcome, measured from different angles. A community that invests in shelter is one where emergency rooms are free for medical emergencies, officers are free for public-safety calls, and courts are free for cases requiring a court appearance. The efficiency gain is real, and it shows up in every department downstream of the work we do every day.

The lives part of the equation

We would do this work even if the cost arithmetic ran the other way. We want to be clear about that because this conversation cannot be simply boiled down to dollars and cents when we are talking about people, neighbors, and community members.

The people who walk through our doors are mothers with their children. They are workers, one paycheck away from living in a car. They are veterans, grandparents, teenagers who aged out of foster care, and neighbors whose luck ran out in a way that could happen to any of us.

What comes next

This is the last post in our series, but it is not the last word on this work. Michigan City’s support for Nest is what made 25 years of shelter possible. The same support is what will make the next 25 years possible.

If this series has given you a clearer picture of how your gift makes a difference, we hope you will act on it. Sponsor a table at our upcoming gala. Write a check. Volunteer. Tell a friend. Bring your employer into the conversation about corporate giving. Every dollar invested here returns to this community several times over, in avoided emergency costs, in children who stay in school, in families that stay intact, in neighbors who get a second chance.

That is the return on shelter. That is what investing in Nest looks like.

The post The Return on Shelter: How Nest Saves Michigan City Money and Lives appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

When most people hear the words “case management,” “mental health services,” or “job readiness,” they picture extras, or services that are nice to have but not necessary. The soft stuff. Things that might help, but that feel like they live outside the real work of getting someone off the street.

At Nest, wraparound services are not nice-to-haves. They are the load-bearing walls that enable someone to move from a crisis to a stable life. They are also, dollar for dollar, one of the most cost-effective investments a community like ours can make. It is one of the things that Nest works diligently on, in partnership with a vast network, to make change happen for our guests. Without connections and partnerships with these vital services, the public ends up paying more. A lot more. Just in less visible places.

Here is what wraparound services provide, what they cost, and what La Porte County would look like if the nonprofits delivering them were not here.

What Wraparound Actually Means

Wraparound is the simple recognition that almost no one becomes unhoused for a single reason, and rarely does one get rehoused through a single intervention. A bed solves tonight and all nights, while connections are made and services are utilized.

A guest walking through our door is likely facing several challenges at once. A lost job. An eviction on record. A mental health crisis that went untreated because there was no insurance. A car that broke down, taking the whole budget with it. An ID that was stolen, making it impossible to apply for work, housing, or benefits.

Wraparound services work to address those layers simultaneously, meaning case management, where one trained person helps a guest build a plan, navigate agencies, chase down documents, and follow through week after week. Mental and behavioral health support, because trauma, depression, and anxiety are often both causes and consequences of housing loss. Job readiness, which includes resume help, interview prep, appropriate work attire, transportation to the first shift, and steady coaching that turns a job offer into a six-month paycheck. Benefits navigation for Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, and veteran services is identified as a standard part of this work. These services are the difference between someone leaving a shelter with a plan and someone leaving a shelter with nothing but a plastic bag. This is the work we do at Nest: connect our guests to these services so that they’ll be successful in their stability once they leave our shelter.

The Math People Do Not See

When wraparound services are not available, the costs do not disappear. The costs must go somewhere; most commonly, they shift onto emergency rooms, hospitals, jails, and court systems, all of which are paid for by the public, one way or another.

Earlier this month, we highlighted the increased expenses our community incurs when there is nowhere else for an unhoused individual to go for medical or crisis care. According to the website HFMA.org, “unhoused individuals visit the emergency room an average of five times per year, at roughly $3,700 per visit, for an average annual ER cost of about $18,500 per person. The highest users can cost the system more than $44,000 per year in ER visits alone.” That is before a single overnight hospital stay. The website Greendoors goes on to state that, “roughly 80 percent of those ER visits are for illnesses that could have been treated with preventive care.”

Our jails also incur higher costs when services are unavailable.  According to in.gov, it costs Indiana an average of $52.61 per day, or $19,202.65 per year, to incarcerate one adult in a state facility. However, an article from June 2025, in the Indiana Capital Chronicle stated that an Indiana Sheriffs’ Association study found the actual cost of housing an inmate in a county jail averages closer to $74 per day.

Now compare that to what a night at Nest costs. We operate at $20.55 per guest overnight and serve meals at $10.27 each. A full week of shelter, meals, and connection to wraparound support at Nest costs less than a single emergency room visit.

When people receive housing paired with case management and behavioral health services, ER visits drop by 61 percent, inpatient hospitalizations drop by 77 percent, and overall healthcare costs drop by 59 percent, according to Greendoors.org. This means that every dollar invested in connections to and in wraparound services saves several more in hospital bills, jail beds, and court time that the public would otherwise absorb.

How La Porte County Nonprofits Share the Journey

Nest Community Shelter in Michigan City is the only year-round emergency shelter that welcomes men, women, and women with children. The guests who walk through our door will often need connections to partners that specialize in health care, a food pantry for when they’re housed, job training, job placement, legal help with document recovery, or access to a community closet through a faith community. At the very least, most, if not all, will sit down with a case manager who can direct guests to the services they need.

Each one of those partners is an expert in their piece. Which means we do not have to build a behavioral health clinic in our basement, a food warehouse in our parking lot, or a legal aid office down the hall. And none of those partners have to build a shelter. Everyone does what they are built to do, and the guest rebuilds, utilizing support from the whole network.

This is a cost-sharing infrastructure. Every nonprofit that specializes in one piece reduces what every other nonprofit has to spend on building redundant services. It is the reason a community of our size can deliver wraparound support at all.

What Would Our Community Look Like Without This Network?

Picture La Porte County without these organizations.

People cycle through emergency rooms at $3,700 per visit instead of receiving preventive care at a partner clinic. Jail beds fill at $52.61 per day, with people who simply found themselves without a safe place to sleep. Employers cannot find workers because no one is helping people get an ID or transportation. Neighbors stay unhoused longer, which costs everyone more in the long run and costs them the most of all.

Nothing about that scenario is cheaper. It just moves the invoice to a different desk.

A Structure of Support

Wraparound services are not fluff. They are the walls that hold the whole system up. They keep emergency rooms free for emergencies. They keep jails from becoming de facto emergency shelters. They keep people moving from crisis to stability at a fraction of what failure would cost all of us.

When you support Nest, you are not funding extras. You are funding infrastructure, and the connection point for our guests to find stability. You are helping a neighbor get from a crisis bed to a lease, and you are quietly saving taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in the process.

That is the math most people never see. Now you have.

The post Nest Community Shelter: A Vital Connection Point to Case Management, Mental Health, and Job Readiness for Our Community. appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

When a shelter is unavailable, this cost is borne by hospitals, jails, municipal budgets, courts, ambulance runs, encampment cleanups, and every taxpayer in the community. The only real question is whether that money is buying stability or worsening the situation for everyone involved.

Today, we are going to show how having a shelter in place eases the burden on the communities it serves. The math below compares one night. One person. Two scenarios.

What One Night at Nest Costs

At Nest, the current cost to provide one guest with one night of safe, supervised emergency shelter, a hot meal, and a small breakfast is $20.55. That figure covers a bed, two meals, case management, and staff on hand around the clock. It also covers the infrastructure that keeps someone out of the cold, out of the emergency room, and out of local jails as an overnight shelter.

Now compare that number to what one night looks like when a person is cycling through the systems that, by default, absorb the cost of being unhoused.

What One Night Unhoused Can Cost the Community

People who are unhoused do not disappear when shelter is unavailable. They move through the most expensive public systems a community operates. Here are the costs of those systems, based on the most recent and widely cited research.

Emergency Room Visits

The average cost of a single emergency room visit in Indiana is $1,618, according to data published by Sanctuary Indy, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between 2015 and 2018, the Midwest recorded 234 emergency room visits per 100 unhoused persons, compared with 42 per 100 non-homeless persons.

Nationally, the Healthcare Financial Management Association reports that a person experiencing homelessness visits the emergency department an average of five times per year, and annual emergency department costs for a single frequent user can reach $44,000.

A single emergency room visit in Indiana, at $1,618, covers the equivalent of 78 nights of shelter at $20.55 per guest.

Hospitalization

Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, cited by the National Coalition for the Homeless, found that people who are unhoused spend an average of four days longer per hospital visit than comparable housed patients. Hospitals absorb much of that cost as uncompensated care, a loss that is then recouped through higher charges to insured patients and higher premiums across the community.

Jail and Law Enforcement

The average daily cost to house an adult inmate in the State of Indiana is $52.61, according to the Indiana Department of Correction. County jail costs are often higher. The Indiana Capital Chronicle reported in June 2025 that a study by the Indiana Sheriffs’ Association found that county jail costs average about $74 per day, with Elkhart County costs ranging from $55 to $125 per day, depending on an inmate’s medical and mental health needs.

Effective July 1, 2026, Indiana Senate Bill 285 classifies camping or sleeping on public land as a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. At $52.61 per day in state facilities, a full 60-day sentence costs taxpayers $3,156.60, equivalent to roughly 154 nights of shelter.

Encampment Response

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Exploring Homelessness Among People Living in Encampments and Associated Cost study found that cities spend between $1,672 and $6,208 per unsheltered person per year on encampment-related activities alone, including outreach, cleaning, clearance, and shelter placement. These costs fall almost entirely on city general funds because HUD dollars cannot be used for encampment cleaning, sanitation, or policing.

Side by Side: One Night, Two Scenarios

All figures are drawn from the cited sources and reflect the most recent data available at the time of publication.

What the Math Shows

A single emergency room visit in Indiana covers 78 nights of shelter. One year of average emergency room use by an unhoused individual is equivalent to nearly 2.5 years of shelter for that person. A single 60-day jail sentence under Indiana’s new public-camping law costs the equivalent of 154 nights of shelter, without addressing the underlying causes of unhousing that led to the arrest.

These are costs the community is already paying, distributed across hospital budgets, county budgets, city general funds, and the premiums of every insured household in the area.

The Indiana Context

In 2024, the statewide Point in Time Count identified 4,854 Hoosiers experiencing homelessness on a single January night, with roughly one in four unsheltered, according to the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority. Outside of Indianapolis, the number of unsheltered people doubled over two years, from 597 in 2022 to 1,138 in 2024.

Every unsheltered night is an opportunity for an emergency room visit, a hospital admission, a law enforcement contact, or a court appearance, each of which costs far more than the shelter bed that could have prevented it.

What Shelter Actually Buys

At $20.55 per guest per night, shelter is not a luxury service, nor is it a long-term solution. It is an interruption. It is the point in the cycle when a person stops being processed by emergency systems and begins to be connected to case management, healthcare, employment resources, and, eventually, permanent housing.

Research compiled by the National Coalition for the Homeless shows that once people are stably housed, emergency room visits drop by nearly 61 percent, healthcare costs fall by 59 percent, and general inpatient hospitalizations decrease by 77 percent.

Shelters are the first step in that chain. It is also, at $20.55 per night, the cheapest step by a wide margin for our community.

Investing in Solutions

The math makes the case, and the research confirms that shelters benefit the entire community, not just those utilizing them. Each community must decide whether it wants to spend its resources managing a crisis in perpetuity or investing in the interruption that allows people, and the community around them, to move forward.

Sources

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cited by Sanctuary Indy, Chronic Homelessness in Indianapolis
• Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, 2024 Indianapolis Point in Time Count Report
• Healthcare Financial Management Association, Compassionate Crusade: The Role of Healthcare in Addressing Homelessness, February 2024
• Indiana Capital Chronicle, Indiana Department of Correction Readies to Pay $12 Million in Jail Back Payments, June 2025
• Indiana Department of Correction, How Much Does It Cost to Keep an Offender in Prison
• Indiana General Assembly, Senate Bill 285 (2026)
• Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, 2024 Balance of State Point in Time Count
• National Coalition for the Homeless, Fact Sheet: Cost of Homelessness
• New England Journal of Medicine, Hospitalization Costs Associated with Homelessness in New York City (Salit et al., 1998)
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Exploring Homelessness Among People Living in Encampments and Associated Cost, 2020

The post Shelter vs. Street: A Side-by-Side Cost Analysis appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

We know that the health outcomes of those who are unhoused tend to be poorer than those of their housed counterparts. Both scenarios above require help, but what happens after that call is made for our unhoused person, and what it does cost our community, is a common occurrence worth understanding.

Who’s Calling, and How Often

Individuals experiencing homelessness use emergency medical services at rates that are dramatically higher than those of the general population.

A peer-reviewed study published in Prehospital Emergency Care analyzed all 911 incidents in Los Angeles over a full year. Unhoused patients were involved in EMS incidents at a rate 14 times higher than housed residents. When it came to ambulance transports to the emergency department, the rate was 19 times higher than for housed patients, according to an article published on Taylor & Francis Online

The same study found something that matters for understanding why this happens: unhoused patients had, on average, lower-level, non-emergency conditions than housed patients. That means many of these calls weren’t life-threatening emergencies. They were people with real needs, cold exposure, untreated chronic illness, mental health crises, who had nowhere else to turn.

The True Cost of a 911 Call

Every ambulance response carries a cost to the EMS system, to the hospital, and to taxpayers. When the same individuals cycle through those systems repeatedly without access to stable housing or primary care, those costs compound quickly.

People experiencing homelessness typically visit the emergency department as often as five times a year, sometimes even weekly, and annual emergency department costs can reach as much as $44,000 for a single frequent user. According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association.

The ambulance ride, triage, clinical time, discharge with nowhere to go, and then the same person back in a week. That cycle is financially and emotionally expensive for everyone.

The Revolving Door Problem

Here’s what makes this particularly hard to solve: the ER can treat what walked in the door, but it can’t address the reason the person came in the first place, or the toll that being unhoused takes.

A hospital can stabilize someone with frostbite, treat a wound, or manage a mental health episode. But when the discharge papers are signed, nothing has changed about the fact that the person has nowhere to go. So, they go back to the street. And often, they’re back in the ER within days, where an emergency shelter is not available.

What Actually Breaks this Cycle

The research is clear. What reduces emergency service use among people experiencing homelessness isn’t more ER capacity or stricter triage policies. It’s stable housing and the support services that make stability possible.

When someone has a safe place to sleep, consistent meals, access to hygiene, and a case manager who knows their name and their situation, something shifts. They stop cycling through the emergency system. Preventable health problems get addressed before they become crises. Chronic conditions become manageable. The revolving door slows down,  and eventually, for many people, it stops.

An emergency room is built to treat what walks in the door. It is not built to ask why that person had nowhere to go last night, or the night before, or for the past three months. It cannot follow up. It cannot coordinate. It cannot call to check in. It discharges people back into the same conditions that brought them in, and it hopes for the best.

We can do all of those things at Nest, and we have for 25 years.

What NEST Actually Provides

We are the only year-round emergency shelter in Michigan City. When someone comes through our doors, they don’t just get a bed for the night. They get a hot meal, access to hygiene, and a case manager working alongside them toward something more permanent. They get stability, and, as the research makes clear, stability is the single most powerful predictor of better health outcomes. They also gain access to additional support services through our network of partners.

The difference between a person who calls 911 at 2 a.m. because they have nowhere else to turn, and a person who sleeps safely, takes their medication, and makes their doctor’s appointment in the morning, is often a shelter bed. It is often us.

The Cost of NEST Not Being There

When organizations like ours are underfunded, under-resourced, or simply not there, people do not disappear. They survive however they can.

For some, that means an ambulance. For some, it means an ER waiting room used as a warming center. For some, it means a police call, a hospital bed for a preventable condition, a discharge to a sidewalk, and the cycle starts again.

Every dollar invested in Nest is a dollar that interrupts that cycle before it becomes a 911 call. Every bed filled here keeps someone out of an emergency department that was never designed to handle what we manage every single day.

For 25 years, Michigan City has had an answer to that cycle. We are it.

The post No Address, No Doctor: The Connection Between Being Unhoused and Emergency Services appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.