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Almost four years after Utah business mogul Gail Miller and her family vowed to match up to $10 million in donations for Utah s three new homeless resource centers in the Salt Lake area, that match has officially been met.
Deseret News
Larry H. and Gail Miller Family Foundation matching grant brings donation total to $20 million
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Paul Mecis talks about being homeless in Salt Lake City on April 6, 2021. Almost four years after Utah business mogul Gail Miller and her family vowed to match up to $10 million in donations for Utah’s three new homeless resource centers in the Salt Lake area, that match has officially been met.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News
Shelter the Homeless, the nonprofit that owns the homeless centers, announced Wednesday that its Home4Change campaign to match the $10 million, dollar-for-dollar Miller grant reached that milestone, 18 months after the centers began operating.
Deseret News
Is Utah solving its homeless problem? The answer is complicated
Political leaders, advocates take stock of what’s been right, and what’s gone wrong, with the state’s new service center model
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Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
When a sudden gust of wind lapped at a tent propped up on the sidewalk, Andrew Blackburn jumped to save a bike that was leaning against it and had toppled over.
A storm was blowing in, with strong winds forecast for the Salt Lake area that night. The tents nestled on the sidewalk beneath murals representing the faces of people killed by police painted on the sides of buildings in an industrial area named the Fleet Block were about to be put to the test.
It s not uncommon for those who are experiencing homelessness to sleep during the day. It s so cold during the day, we go find the sun and we sleep; that makes us look lazy. You know, we re exhausted, we re starving, we re hungry, we re angry, we re lonely, we re tired, Sunny Sparkman said.
She added that the other night she had walked all night to stay warm.
Utah s previous approaches and solutions
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development statistics in 2019, there are 2,789 people experiencing homelessness either temporarily or long-term in Utah on any given night.
Utah was once hailed as a national model for reducing chronic homelessness by 91 percent in 2015, but that number was misleading. A 2018 performance audit of Utah s Homeless Services revealed that although matters did improve, the data displaying a significant drop in the number of chronically homeless people could be attributed to the changes made in the methods used to count chronic homel