The Harvard Square Homeless Shelter (HSHS) is an emergency shelter in Harvard Square that provides food, shelter, and a welcoming environment to 25+ guests every night for the 6 coldest months of the year, with a season that spans from November 1st to April 15th.

HSHS first opened its doors on February 17th, 1983, but the shelter guests stepped into back then was organized quite differently than it is today. Prior to the founding of HSHS, some churches across the City of Cambridge had meal programs, but there were very few shelters. In 1982, Stewart Guernsey, then an attorney and first-year student at the Harvard Divinity School, was impacted by the number of people experiencing homelessness around Harvard, and began volunteering for one of these meal programs at Christ Church in Cambridge. Guernsey struggled immensely to find shelter for people he would meet while volunteering, leading him to, at times, invite people to sleep in his dorm; however, he promptly moved to address the need for a shelter in Cambridge, speaking to Church leaders in the area. Pastor Fred Reisz of University Lutheran Church agreed to loan out the basement of the Church for this endeavor, volunteers were recruited from the Harvard student community, and the emergency shelter they opened still stands today as HSHS. There were many logistical and bureaucratic challenges, but the shelter was able to provide food and a warm place to sleep for many people throughout its first season. After the first year of operations, undergraduate students moved on to lead the shelter, and a committed team of 2 directors and 7 supervisors began the shift toward the shelter we operate today. From this small team, logbooks, and a lot of on-the-spot decision-making, we have progressed to become a shelter with a committed staff of over 30 students, technological integration, and clearly outlined policies, but, we would be nowhere without the insurmountable efforts of those that came before us.

University Lutheran Church is still a key partner for HSHS, and that same basement guests stepped into in 1983 is our space to this day. However, many physical aspects of the space and organizational logistics are quite different. In the late 1990s, close to $1 million was raised to renovate the space and transform it into an actual shelter with laundry, a dining area, and an accessible entrance. HSHS is now a recognizable shelter in the state of Massachusetts, reports data to federal systems, and receives substantial government funding. HSHS also falls under the umbrella of the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), the hub for student service endeavors at Harvard College. PBHA is a staffed, yet student-led, 501(c)(3) non-profit that houses dozens of programs ranging from afterschool tutoring and mentoring to legal services and ESL classes, but HSHS has become the largest program under its umbrella. In a way, HSHS relies less on PBHA than other smaller programs do because of its large staff and volunteer force, but, PBHA is a key partner for the shelter that provides financial and administrative support, as well as oversight over operations. HSHS is undeniably student-run and student-operated, but it would not be possible without the support of partners like PBHA, the University Lutheran Church, and government funding.

Internally though, HSHS is run by a staff that has fluctuated from about 20 people stretched very thin after the pandemic to around 40 now. About half of this staff tends to be supervisors and the other half are directors. Supervisors are tasked with looking after one overnight shift per week, and there are between two and three of them physically in the space each night. The remaining staff members are either directors or directors-in-training; HSHS trains directors for a semester when the person who occupies the position is graduating, facilitating transitions and preserving institutional memory. All staff are responsible for reading notes about what happened at the shelter daily, and must attend weekly staff meetings. Aside from these responsibilities, staff members can also opt in to be a part of the policy committee, which makes decisions about rules and consequences and meets every week; hiring committee, which is tasked with leading the recruitment of new staff among volunteers; and a variety of other task forces. HSHS has 13 directorships, and each is responsible for a specific area of shelter operations or a special shelter program:

1. Staff: Oversees the shelter’s supervisors and directors, facilitates weekly staff and policy meetings.
2. Administrative: Tracks occupancy metrics, serves as a liaison between the shelter and key partners like University Lutheran Church and PBHA.
3. Volunteer: Recruits, trains, and manages the 250+ volunteers that keep the shelter running.
4. Supplies: Ensures shelter is always stocked with necessities by going on weekly supply runs.
5. Food/In-Kind: Manages food and in-kind donations - a lot of the shelter’s food is donated from Harvard University Dining Services (dining hall surpluses).
6. Maintenance: Keeps up the physical space, ensures appliances are working appropriately, and organizes routine deep cleans.
7. Guest Advocacy: Meets to hear guests’ comments once per week, serves as guests’ voice in staff and policy meetings.
8. Community Engagement: Organizes events to foster community within HSHS staff and volunteers.
9. Technology: Manages the shelter’s technological infrastructure (Salesforce, phone systems, etc.).
10. Finance: Oversees shelter spending and manages the budget.
11. Work Contract: Facilitates a special program in which guests can stay with us for an entire season with the condition that they have a source of income and are saving money weekly.
12. Street Team: Oversees our outreach program, which goes out every day to the Harvard and Central Square areas and distributes food and supplies to people experiencing homelessness.
13. Guest Advocacy: Trains and oversees our team of guest advocates, undergraduate students who are in the space every day to connect people to resources from the government, help them get an ID, etc.

Saying HSHS is a unique shelter would be quite an understatement. For one, it is the first student-run homeless shelter and one of a handful across the nation: two others (one of which is also in Harvard Square) are under the Youth2Youth umbrella which was founded by a former HSHS staff member and serves people experiencing homelessness that are under 25 years of age, another is the Student-Run Emergency Housing Unit of Philadelphia (SREHUP), and the rest (three open, one in construction) fall under the Students4Students non-profit which facilitates student-run homeless shelters for homeless students in California.
Yet, HSHS is different in many other ways relative to other shelters around Boston and even other student-run homeless shelters: HSHS is a dry shelter, meaning no drugs or alcohol are allowed whatsoever - guests are breathalyzed prior to each entry and drug tested if there is any suspicion of use. We are also smaller, with a capacity of around 25 people each night. This smaller size helps us be very conscious about fostering a safer space, and lets us put on special events for our guests quite frequently: a weekly art class, a weekly foot care clinic run by Harvard Medical School, trainings on securing subsidized housing, self-care nights, and guest advocacy meetings where feedback is taken in - we really try to make HSHS a second home for those who stay with us.

The small size of our shelter enables this sense of community and allows us to host all these events; however, it means we cannot take in everyone who comes to our door. Because of this, we run several lotteries each day: a 9pm lottery for 1-night emergency beds, an 11pm lottery for last call 1-night emergency beds, and a 7:30am lottery for 3-week beds. The bulk of our guests stay on 3-week beds, which means they win a bed and can stay with us for 3 weeks. We typically have around 5 emergency beds open for 1-night guests. People who call in get a number, and a computer program determines our winners based on the number of beds we have for each gender and the people who entered. Every guest who comes into HSHS must do an intake process, in which some information is voluntarily gathered for government funding purposes, and the community norms of our space are shared. The lottery system undeniably has its flaws, but, it is difficult to come up with a more fair model. Starting next season though, lotteries will be a thing of the past.

Studying HSHS is particularly timely now because our shelter is going through a significant model change due to state funding guidelines. To maintain our funding, we are pivoting from an emergency bed shelter to a transitional housing shelter - this is the type of shelter HSHS has been running over the summer for several years, and means that the people who start staying with us on November 1st will stay with us throughout the season. Capacity and occupancy will be reduced, but we will provide those who stay with us with more services and center the goal of getting them housed - it’s a change of vision for what a shelter should strive for and entails a shift from defining success as ‘how many people can we provide food and shelter to tonight’ to ‘how many of our guests can we connect to transitional housing.’ Guests would be staying with us until we find them a more sustainable housing option. Though a controversial move, I think a key benefit is reducing the stress of lotteries and the uncertainty of whether or not one will have a bed in a week or two. The certainty of this bed allows guests to focus on work, connecting with resources, and could prove to be quite beneficial. This will be a big adjustment for our guests, but it will undeniably also affect the work our staff does and how we engage with our volunteers.

HSHS does many things right: the shelter’s unique advocacy and supplemental programming, a flat student leadership model of directors splits tasks according to peoples’ skillset and preferences, the policy decisions are made through a deliberation process that ensures everyone can voice their opinions, and staff feels like a community of friends who you can turn to when times get rough. However, there are undeniable challenges within the organization.

As the incoming Volunteer Director at HSHS, I am stepping into a position in which I am responsible for recruiting, training, and managing the over 250 volunteers, most of whom are undergraduate students, that keep our shelter running. The impact I know our student volunteers have on our guests, as well as that our guests have on our volunteers, keeps me immensely motivated. However, I have noticed this is not the case for all students who engage with us. HSHS has four shifts: dinner, evening, overnight (through which you sleep in turns at the shelter), and breakfast (which starts around 6am). Volunteers tend to be hard to recruit, particularly for overnight shifts, and once recruited can be hard to retain. Around the middle of each semester, when academic and extracurricular commitments, absences rise and the shelter encounters some logistical challenges. As such, I sought to answer the question: how can the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter improve volunteer recruitment and retention?

Recruiting, training, and managing over 250 volunteers is extremely time-consuming, which has led to HSHS’s procedures for all these processes remaining relatively unchanged throughout the years, but, through an evidence-based approach, I have identified areas to improve our volunteer-related efforts. The principal methods for finding this evidence were a review of the literature, a large-scale volunteer survey, and interviews with experts in homeless shelters. My motivation for pursuing this project lies in a passion for working with people experiencing homelessness that started in high school, and because I want to see HSHS provide the best possible experience for our guests and volunteers alike. Coming to Harvard and working at the first student-run homeless shelter has made me incredibly supportive of this model, so I also investigated some of the general best practices in other student-run homeless shelter’s operations in order to provide insight for other HSHS directors on possible improvements to their branch, as well as to share insight that might help future students who might want to use their institution’s resources to establish similar programs.