Beth-El Center Executes $1.8M Land Acquisition For A New Shelter

Milford, CT — Beth-El Center has always strived to help those in need in and around Milford, from its No Freeze-Shelter to hot meals for those in need.

As time went on and Beth-El Center started to do more and more, they realized they needed a larger location to do more and provide the best help possible.

The future of Beth-El Center is a new building located at 993 Bridgeport Ave.

“If you drive by the area now, it’s an open lot with a chain-link fence around it,” Jennifer Paradis, Beth-El Center executive director, said.” I can’t wait to move to be a beautiful part of Milford and raise the property values of the places and businesses around it. I can’t wait to be closer to our partners like Bridges Healthcare and others.”

On Thursday, Oct. 12, Paradis signed their half of the land acquisition deal for $1.8 million. On Oct. 20, Paradis said the contract had been executed.

Representatives of the Milford Bank, which helped Beth-El Center with the land acquisition, Representatives Kathy Kennedy (CT-119) and Frank Smith (CT-118) and Sheila Dravis Milford, CDBG Administrator, were present on Oct. 12.

“It’s not the building that makes us, but this building will help us drive closer to our mission to solve homelessness to solve hunger,” Paradis added.

The new shelter will feature a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week drop-in center for the unsheltered community.

“It’s a place for everyone to belong,” Paradis said. “A place where their basic needs are met like washing their clothes and accessing Wi-Fi.”

It will also feature a micro-shelter, each unit having two beds and one bathroom.

“This will help our married couples who need to be split up now because of our congregate shelter,” Paradis said. “It will help our youth who struggle to be in congregate shelters. It will help the LGBTQ and Trans communities and those with emotional support service animals. That is driving so much of our chronic homelessness because our services are not built to respond to their needs, which is our job.”

The new shelter will also feature supportive housing.

“We do have a small, supportive housing program, but what we are doing is scaling that model up and adding 11 permanent supporting housing units for folks who need that in our community,” Paradis said. “We have learned a lot over the past 40 years, and you see that in our building model today.”

The project of moving to a new location started three years ago, in 2020, when Beth-El Center was working through what the future of the center looked like.

“We were sheltering double the amount of folks, even triple that of our typical capacity. Our soup kitchen was cranking out hundreds and hundreds of more meals a day,” Paradis said.

Paradis said they had an online presentation during their year-end event for their supporters and donors of that year.

“We saw the community come out like never before,” she said. “We called the event ‘Ending Homelessness in Milford’ and talked about the lessons we learned that year. Not just at the center but the community partners we worked with that year.”

Paradis said their job at the center is not just to make poverty livable and not to work one or two cases of homelessness daily but to solve homelessness and end hunger.

“During the online meeting, the speaker said that Milford has everything they need to get this job done,” she said. “The speaker said they ended chronic homelessness in their county in a year by reducing inflow and increasing outflow.”

Paradis said that’s the structure they have adopted at Beth-El Center by creating new programs to help those in need in Milford.

“What we are looking for is that alignment of a physical plan to ensure that our model maximizes every opportunity we have,” Paradis said. “That brought us to finding an architect who understood and believed in our vision, which led us to create a building committee.”