The Safe Camping Project opens in South Fayetteville
Solomon Burchfield 8-13-20. The Safe Camp is quietly opening on the South end of Fayetteville. After years of uncertainty about how to help the population of homeless folks camping in local woods, the city has worked out a plan using covid relief money to establish a 12-acre plot where campers will be protected from many of the long list of threats they face on a daily basis and have access to vital services they previously had to travel a wide area to receive.
New Beginnings Coordinator Solomon Burchfield has been talking to local campers (homeless folks identify that way) a lot over the years as he worked with 7 Hills Homeless Center and now works with the New Beginnings Project to resolve some of the many issues cities and campers have.
The Safe Camp will accommodate 50 campers. Services being installed like porta potties, showers, a trailer where social workers will serve needs, and meal deliveries from the Salvation Army will come 3 times a day are things that Solomon has been told by campers would make their hard lives more manageable. A major issue is that Fayetteville police are scaling back the kind of surveillance usually aimed at homeless people. Things like stop and frisks, demands to check backpacks, issuing citations, and dismantling camps that made life most difficult for people already struggling to survive will be eliminated in the Safe Camp.
The cooperation of the police is a major issue, but the development of the Safe Camp as also a model of how homeless folks can operate that will be important to testing new ways to deal with the serious problems places like Fayetteville face about accessible housing. It’s an issue that simply has to be faced here.
Thank you to 7 Hills Homeless Center, who’s taking the lead on the Safe Camp Project, and to the Salvation Army, the New Beginnings Project, and others in the network of care behind them, for the hard work that has gone on so much behind the scenes trying to create this new model.
There’ll be an ongoing need for support after the covid relief money runs out. Donations and support of several kinds will help our community and these most vulnerable campers to survive homelessness and thrive again. I hope Omni folks will stay tuned to the issue and be ready to offer help when we’re asked for it.
Fayetteville does another amazing thing
