A NOTE FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR:

This year Lowell Transitional Living Center will celebrate twenty-five years of service to the homeless in the Merrimack Valley.  In that time, literally tens of thousands of individuals have found it necessary to seek the kind of help that all of us never wish to. 

There is no prototypical homeless man or woman. 

While many people have an image of the homeless and the work that happens in a shelter, I’ve learned that the community’s ideas of our guests and the services we provide to help them often do not match what I see.    In my years as a shelter director I have met a wide variety of “homeless”; a Gold Star mother, the COO of a Fortune 500 company, a gifted artist, a traumatized Viet Nam veteran, a registered nurse and a number of grandparents yearning to be reunited with their families.  In some cases, addiction propelled them into homelessness, and this is the image many have of shelter guests.  But more often I have worked with people for whom it was a crisis that sapped all their financial resources and forced them to leave their homes. Each person we serve has unique needs and requires targeted services.  This is where the LTLC can be most helpful; assessing those individual needs and managing the structure process to enable our guests to migrate to more suitable housing.  The LTLC does this extremely well. 

Our goal is to find permanent housing for each person in need that crosses our doors.

In the past year; 87.5% of our shelter guests stayed with us less than three months, and 48.7% stayed less than a week.  We have been, and continue to be, a safety net for those needing our services for short duration, but for far too many we are still a home. So our mission continues, to support those who need a bed and a meal for a short time, as well as those who need more targeted services to help them move beyond shelter.

We need a better way to tell the story about the causes, and solutions for homelessness. 

It is a difficult task, and LTLC cannot achieve it alone. We need a supportive community to end homelessness. We welcome you in this shared mission.

Dave McCloskey

Executive Director