Corrie Lingenfelter, interim excutive director of Downtown Daily Bread, talks about what's next after Harrisburg officials declared the encampment under the Mulberry Street bridge a danger and is forcing all the people living there to move out so it can be cleaned.
Jeremy Long / WITF
Jeremy Long / WITF
Corrie Lingenfelter, interim excutive director of Downtown Daily Bread, talks about what's next after Harrisburg officials declared the encampment under the Mulberry Street bridge a danger and is forcing all the people living there to move out so it can be cleaned.
Airdate: May 8th, 2023
Earlier this year, nearly 70 homeless people – living under the Mulberry Street Bridge in Harrisburg – were re-located to other encampments. The city cited public health concerns as the reason for the move.
It was one of the rare times, Harrisburg’s homeless population was in the news.
There are organizations that work to feed, find housing and provide others services people living on the streets. Two of them were with us on The Spark Monday.
Our guests were Corrie Lingenfelter “Chef Corrie”, Executive Director of Downtown Daily Bread and Tara Davis, Director of Agency Services and Outreach at the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank.
Lingenfelter described services Downtown Daily Bread provides besides food assistance,”In Downtown Daily Bread on 234 South Street in Harrisburg, we not just a kitchen, not just a soup kitchen. We have every day a drop-in center from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. where we provide shelter, obviously somewhere to sleep. We have computers, we have vendors that come in and that could be anywhere from UPMC Street Feet coming in, doctors coming in, attorneys coming in, sometimes for pro-bono situations. And then we offer mail services and an area to get showers. So, I just call it the one stop shop for all things of our unsheltered neighbors of those that even low income you know, we don’t stop at just homelessness. Sometimes we want to prevent homelessness. And so that was my big key when I became the executive director is to shift, you know, we’re all one thing away, I say, sometimes from being homeless, and that really hits home, especially nowadays and how things are in in the economy. So we want to prevent that. So, if it’s a guest that, hey, we don’t have enough to get us by till we get our next check, we offer meals, no questions asked.”
Davis added,”We’re seeing folks that are brand new to the charitable food assistance world, folks that have never been a supporter of the central food bank or their local pantry. And now they’re having to come to those pantries for the first time for services. You know, as you touched baseline from that report, some folks are just, you know, maybe their car broke down and now they have a $400 repair. And that has put them in this situation of needing to look for food assistance. And so, we are now probably I’d say probably about six, five, 6% below our highest peak during COVID. So we are definitely seeing an increase in need. Many of our pantries and programs are seeing an increase in their lines.”
