24-Hour Homelessness Event Oct. 8-9 Outside Library
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On Oct. 8, a bench outside the Anderson County Library, will become a place of deliberate purpose, as Ryan Duerk, the president and chief executive of Miracle Hill Ministries, plans to spend 24 consecutive hours there, beginning at 3 p.m., talking with people about homelessness, recovery, housing, addiction, public policy and the complicated paths that can lead a person to sleep without a home.
The conversations will be livestreamed through Miracle Hill’s YouTube and Facebook platforms and will continue until 3 p.m. Oct. 9.
The event, “Conversations on a Bench,” is part of a North American initiative coordinated by Citygate Network in the days leading up to World Homeless Day. The concept is simple but deliberately countercultural: sit down, remain available and listen long enough for the usual assumptions about homelessness to become less certain. Citygate describes the project as a storytelling effort meant to “rehumanize” people experiencing homelessness through direct, public conversation.
For Duerk, who has participated in the initiative for the past two years, the bench is a way to replace abstraction with names, faces and stories. Nearly 200 people have joined him in previous conversations. Last year, more than 70 rescue-mission chief executives participated in similar events across North America.
This year, the bench will be in Anderson — a location that gives the event a more immediate local meaning.
“Three in four individuals experiencing homelessness in Anderson are unsheltered,” Duerk said. “There are no simple answers to homelessness, and no single organization can solve it alone.”
The public is invited to sit down. So are people who are experiencing homelessness, pastors, students, service providers, business leaders, local officials and residents who may have questions about what they see in the city but have never had a reason to ask them directly.
Miracle Hill, the Greenville-based Christian nonprofit, has been exploring the possibility of establishing emergency-shelter services in Anderson since local leadership formally invited the organization to consider the community in August 2025.
The organization later received board approval to pursue an Anderson project and has been looking for a suitable building ever since. Duerk has described the search as a real-estate problem with unusually high stakes: a location must be large enough, safe enough, adaptable enough and close enough to jobs, public transportation, medical care and other services that people need while trying to regain stability.
The ideal permanent facility, Duerk has said, would exceed 30,000 square feet, already include sprinklers and bathrooms, and sit close to the city rather than far from the networks of work and care that shelter residents rely on. Constructing a new shelter from the ground up would be prohibitively expensive, so Miracle Hill is seeking an existing building that can be renovated for residential use.
Those buildings are rare.
The organization is also considering a shorter-term site that could open for one or two years while it continues pursuing a permanent home. Its model would be intended to stabilize people in shelter and connect them with work, medical care, counseling, transportation and eventual transitional-housing opportunities, rather than replicate services offered by Anderson organizations already working in those areas.
Duerk has said the scarcity of shelter beds is central to the problem. In Anderson, he said, about one out of every four people experiencing homelessness can access safe shelter. The other three remain unsheltered — living outdoors, in vehicles, doubled up precariously with others or moving from one temporary arrangement to the next.
A bench cannot provide a bed. It cannot solve a zoning dispute, renovate an aging building or secure the funding necessary to operate a shelter. But it can make visible the human reality behind the policy questions.
“Conversations on a Bench” is built around the idea that homelessness is frequently discussed without the participation of people who know it firsthand.
A person walking past a bench may see someone resting. A policymaker may see a statistic. A business owner may see a challenge to downtown commerce. A service provider may see unmet medical, mental-health, addiction-recovery or housing needs. The person on the bench may be carrying all of those realities at once.
Citygate Network, the organization behind the national effort, will bring together more than 300 faith-driven rescue missions and related ministries across North America. Its program asks executive directors and chief executives to remain on a bench for 24 hours while guests join them in real-time conversations. The event is designed to shift public perception, encourage collaboration and foreground stories of resilience, recovery and hope.
Duerk’s event is expected to include people who have experienced homelessness, as well as people whose work touches the issue from other angles: outreach workers, clergy members, educators, civic leaders, nonprofit staff, employers and concerned residents.
“There are no simple answers to homelessness,” Duerk said.
That is perhaps the central premise of the event. Homelessness may look, from a distance, like a single condition with a single prescribed remedy. Get a job. Find housing. Seek treatment. But the work of recovery is often complicated by disability, trauma, family breakdown, criminal histories, transportation barriers, untreated illness, addiction, missing identification documents and the ordinary difficulty of finding housing while having no stable address.
The bench is intended as a place where those complications can be spoken aloud.
The event begins at 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8, outside the Anderson County Library and concludes at 3 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9.
Members of the public may participate in person or follow the livestream through Miracle Hill’s social-media channels. Miracle Hill hopes the event will build relationships among the people and organizations already confronting the issue in Anderson, while encouraging residents to see homelessness not as someone else’s problem but as a challenge requiring a community-wide response.
The organization’s potential move into Anderson remains unsettled. There is no announced shelter site, no completed purchase and no opening date. What exists, for now, is a search for a building and a stated desire to become part of the community’s response.
For 24 hours, that search will be represented by something smaller and more visible: a bench at the library, a camera, a CEO who intends to remain there, and an open invitation to sit down.
