Mar 22, 2024 By Mike Jones 3 min read

Since September, the City Mission has on average had to turn away more than 58 women each month from their 15-bed shelter in Washington due to not having enough available space.

Most of the women who need help are in abusive domestic situations, moving from house to house sleeping on couches to get out of bad situations or are working in prostitution in exchange for a place to stay.

For every woman who is turned away, that means they have to continue living in “dangerous situations” without access to getting the help they need, said Diana Irey Vaughan, who is the new president and CEO of the City Mission.

“This signifies the need for women’s services,” Irey Vaughan said. “This really tells the story about why this is needed.”

The hope with the plans to build a new 50-bed women’s shelter is that the larger facility will help City Mission to accommodate more people in need and get them on a better path when they leave. Construction on the facility, which is within the City Mission’s campus in Washington, will begin in May and is expected to take a little more than a year to complete.

It will include child care space, a family sleeping unit, individual sleeping units, common areas similar to a living room and numerous bedrooms.

“It is going to be a state-of-the-art facility,” Irey Vaughan said.

Over the past month, the need for the facility has gotten lost in the shuffle of a controversy surrounding the Local Share Account committee’s decision to remove a $500,000 grant recommendation for the City Mission at the last minute. That decision was reversed this week when the LSA committee reconvened Wednesday to recommend giving the nonprofit a slice of the $9.2 million in casino gambling revenue. That decision was unanimously approved by the Washington County commissioners at their regular voting meeting Thursday morning.

Irey Vaughan, who delivered the opening prayer at the meeting, thanked both the LSA committee and commissioners for reconsidering their request.

“I’m here to say thank you,” said Irey Vaughan, who served as a county commissioner for 28 years before retiring in January and taking the City Mission’s leadership position earlier this month.

She said the publicity surrounding their grant request helped to pull in more donations from private donors, which boosted the amount of cash on hand available for the project. They have nearly $4.2 million in cash donations on hand, coupled with nearly $700,000 in written pledges with additional money in verbal pledges. The $500,000 grant from the LSA money puts the total available funds at $5.6 million.

“It really did activate the public and really made the public aware … of what’s going on in their communities,” Irey Vaughan said in an interview after Thursday’s meeting.

That support will be needed, too, because while the original price tag for the facility was estimated to be around $5.2 million, the cost has increased and could surpass $7 million. But Irey Vaughan said that money will go a long way in helping many women in need by not only offering shelter, but also giving them programs and tools to change their lifestyles and find success.

Most importantly, the new shelter will now give many more women another option to improve their lives.

“We work with them to find permanent housing when they leave,” she said.