Bangor’s Together Place recovery center is closing its daytime drop-in center and meals program effective immediately, the nonprofit’s leaders announced Friday.
The group, which has a history in Bangor going back to 1981, said last week that it would need to shut down those programs if it couldn’t come up with $220,000 in donations to keep its services going for another year.
The Together Place has raised about $145,000 in pledged and cash donations, and its leaders plan to keep fundraising until they reach their goal and can reopen the center as soon as possible. Friday was its last day open until then.
“The amazing thing that’s happened is that we are incredibly close to raising our goal,” Joe Hartel, the center’s director, said. “We’re about $75,000 away from hitting that goal, and it’s because of the amazing support of the Bangor community and the folks beyond.”
People who visit the center for help with mental health and addiction say the closure of those programs will be a huge loss. It also means one less place where homeless community members can go during the day.
“You’re my family,” Amy Graves said to the other Together Place members gathered for the center’s final hour Friday afternoon. “Please keep this place open, because we need recovery.”
The center at 2 Second St. was open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays for anyone who wanted to drop by and provided low-cost hot lunches and a slate of recovery support groups. The center serves 20 to 50 people a day, according to the organization. This winter, it also offered an overnight warming shelter with funding from the city.
Jessica Burt, who used to work at the Together Place and still visits as a person who is five and half years in recovery herself, said earlier this week that the closure represents a “serious crisis,” adding that “screwing with people’s recovery” can lead to individual setbacks and harm the broader community.
“It’s not just the homeless community” who will be affected, she said, but a wide range of people who need peer support services.
The nonprofit has struggled to find funding over the past year after it lost a $300,000 state grant, which Rep. Amy Roeder, D-Bangor, the director at the time, said was due to mistakes she made in the grant application. The Together Place hasn’t been able to replace that funding since.
City Councilor Joe Leonard proposed giving the Together Place money from its opioid settlement funds in a Monday workshop.
For people who rely on the center to “lose those services overnight … those burdens would go directly onto downtown Bangor,” Leonard said.
But councilors haven’t yet made a decision on the matter, with others expressing concerns about the center’s repeated financial issues in the last year and the fairness of awarding opioid funds to the Together Place over other organizations whose applications scored higher in the grant process earlier this spring.
“They did lose their state funding last year, and so we’re a year later, looking at funding again. And so I’m wondering if we’re going to be in the same situation if we were to go ahead and rush this through,” Councilor Angela Walker said.
Councilors are scheduled to discuss the Together Place’s funding again at a committee meeting on Monday.
The organization’s employment connections program and some peer recovery groups, including Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous, will continue while the drop-in center is closed.
People in need of recovery support services can visit the Bangor Area Recovery Network at 142 Center St. in Brewer.