Multimillion-Dollar Crisis Center Falls Short on Funds

Covenant House officials say they have raised over $12 million from a number of state, federal, private, and corporate donations and plan on raising the additional $8 million within the next year.

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By Alexis Fernandez

Story Created: Mar 8, 2011 at 11:36 PM AKDT

Story Updated: Mar 9, 2011 at 1:56 PM AKDT

Alaska’s homeless teens may be getting more services and bed space as Covenant House Alaska works to secure funding for a new multimillion-dollar crisis center in downtown Anchorage.

“Our house is full. We don’t have enough beds for the number of kids that come to us every night for a safe place to sleep,” Covenant House Alaska Executive Director Deirdre Cronin said.

Shelter officials say they are having trouble catering to the growing population of homeless teens but plan to fix the problem with the construction of a new multimillion-dollar crisis center to be built between 8th Avenue and A Street.

“We have outgrown our home and it’s full—our functional capacity is 30 [kids]. Six days this month alone we've been near 44 kids,” Cronin said.

The new project has been in the planning stages for more than five years after officials scrapped the prospect of renovating the existing building.

“The renovation was going to be very expensive. It’s also a shipper building, historical building, by Alaskan standards…we also just didn’t think this was the best block to be on anymore,” Cronin said.

But the new building will not be cheap with an estimate of $20 million. The Municipality of Anchorage helped foot almost $700,000 to buy the land, but the community will be asked to pay for the rest.

“Most of those funds will either come from state dollars, perhaps a federal grant. [The] city won’t contribute very much. We do contribute some money to operations for segments of the population,” Anchorage Assembly Member Patrick Flynn said.

And officials say a new home for homeless teens cannot wait any longer.

“We don’t want them to fall through the cracks. They’re not in trouble, they don’t have a safe place to go, so we need to give them a safe place to go and help them up on their feet so they can become contributing members of society,” Flynn said.

Covenant House officials say they have raised over $12 million from a number of state, federal, private, and corporate donations and plan on raising the additional $8 million within the next year.

Construction is scheduled for April 2012 with the grand opening expected early 2013.

 

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