Hope Missions a Depends on Community Support as Winter Rages
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
When the temperature in Anderson slips past discomfort into danger, the courtyard gate at Hope Missions of the Upstate becomes an unlikely threshold between cold and warmth. Dave Phillips, the organization’s CEO, has learned to track the season not by holidays or school calendars but by the number on the thermometer; at 38 degrees or below, for more than a brief dip, the building stops being merely a daily ministry and becomes the county’s de facto warming center.
“Last night we had 60 people at the warming center,” Phillips said on Wednesday, while recalling a morning when his own phone told him it was 21 degrees outside. “We had a whole bunch of people here.”
Inside, the operation looks improvised only at first glance. There are rooms where 32 cots are divided for men, and others where they are divided for 12 for women, plus another 20 mats that can be laid out on the floor for those who would rather stretch out than sleep in a standard bed. Some guests, wired by the cold and the stress of their days, stay awake all night, but most settle down around 10, when volunteers start urging people toward their assigned spaces.
Phillips runs the place with the quiet rigor of someone who understands that structure is its own kind of kindness: volunteers make 30‑minute security rounds to ensure everyone is where they are supposed to be, cots and mats are assigned rather than claimed, and the rules are simple enough to be remembered in the fog of exhaustion. The operation, he insists, is “pretty simple” at its core—offer a warm, safe place, and people will come.
Phillips said the people who show up on bitter nights are not a single, neatly defined population.
“We see a lot of different people,” Phillips said. There are those who are “literally homeless,” carrying their entire lives in backpacks or plastic bags, and there are others who have a house but no functioning heat, no electricity, no way to make the cold relent once they close their front door. For them, Hope Missions is less a shelter than a last resort against a particular kind of Southern winter, one that brings damp, bone‑deep chill. The center exists “to provide a warm and safe place for folks,” a phrase that sounds understated until one imagines the alternative.
If the cots and coffee are the visible side of the warming center, the invisible machinery is made of volunteers and an intricate grid of four‑hour shifts. On the Hope Missions website, the schedule appears as a sequence of coded blocks—each one a small ask that adds up to sustained hospitality from early evening to morning. Phillips aims for two men and two women on each shift, both for coverage and for tone. The presence of multiple volunteers, he said, “helps keep peace, keeps things quiet,” and means that the countless small questions that define any communal space—Where’s the bathroom? Is there more coffee? — do not bottleneck into frustration. The work, he likes to say, runs on caffeine as much as on compassion.
Safety, a subject that hovers over any conversation about congregate shelters, is both carefully planned and gently demystified. The courtyard gate where Phillips stood Wednesday to talk to The Anderson Observer is locked, with a doorbell mounted beside it; anyone who wants to come in must ring and be met. Guests are screened there, not through metal detectors or formal searches but through conversation.
“Our number one rule in the warming center is to be kind,” Phillips said. If that rule can survive a brief exchange at the gate—if the person is calm enough, cooperative enough, to talk—then they are welcomed inside. Should something go wrong, law enforcement already understands the rhythms of the place and is prepared to “come and straighten it out.” In Phillips’s telling, trouble is the exception, not the norm.
The storms themselves complicate everything. As forecasts begin to mention ice and extended cold, the warming center’s calendar stretches like a rubber band.
“Planning is really hard,” said Phillips. For the current system, his website shows blocks of time stacked from Saturday straight through Tuesday “and it just continues on because I don’t know how long it’s going to last.” The projected cold, he added, is not a one‑night event but “a lot of cold coming up,” which means “we need a lot of volunteers to be able to be here.” When he has four to six volunteers on site, the machine hums: questions get answered, tensions are defused, and staff can “switch off pretty easily.” When those blanks on the schedule remain empty, the burden grows heavier.
All of this—the cots, the coffee (and sugar), the monitoring—sits on top of the rest of Hope Missions’ work rather than replacing it.
“Everything else continues,” Phillips said, a reminder that the organization is not a seasonal pop‑up but a year‑round attempt to move people out of crisis. Four case managers, who are not formally part of the warming center, continue their efforts during the day, meeting with guests, tracking progress, and looking for housing.
The nights in the center, however, change those conversations. Staff have noticed that people who use the warming center 80 percent or more of the time become key candidates for deeper intervention; their steady presence forms a pattern case managers can work with. The warming center, in that sense, is both “a benefit and a burden”—stretching staff thin but also creating opportunities to move some guests into more stable lives.
That stability depends on a network of institutions that rarely get marquee billing. Phillips is quick to mention Anderson County, which ensures that the generator at Hope Missions stays operational so the building can remain warm even if the power grid falters.
County staff “come by and fix things,” Phillips said, and generally “are super helpful.” Churches across the area likewise provide meals. Volunteers, in his view, are the indispensable ingredient. “We could not do this without them,” he said.
There is also the matter of supplies that do not make it into line‑item budgets but quietly determine the mood of a room. During warming‑center operations, Phillips has learned, everything related to coffee doubles.
On a typical week, Hope Missions might go through 25-30 pounds of coffee. When temperatures plunge and the gate bell rings more often, that number jumps to 50 pounds, paired with an almost comic 150 pounds of sugar. The disproportion makes sense once you imagine the moment he describes: someone walking in “freezing cold” and wrapping their hands around a hot cup, the steam and sweetness serving as both physical comfort and emotional reset.
For those inclined to help a visit to a web address is the gateway: hopeupstate.org. There, the warming center banner stretches across the top of the screen, linking to the current schedule of operations. Any blank on that grid, Phillips explained, is an unclaimed shift.
He publishes his email—dave@hopeupstate.org—and his cell number, inviting potential volunteers to text him with the shorthand of regulars.
For those who cannot show up in person, there is a donation page—cash that can be turned quickly into coffee, sugar, cots, or whatever else the next storm requires. In the layered economy of winter in Anderson County, these are the small transactions that, multiplied, keep one building’s lights on and one gate’s doorbell ringing when the temperature drops.
