Amos House is Expanding

The Providence Journal
Eileen Hayes, CEO of Amos House, visits the Friendship Café. Weekly specials include chicken pot pie on Mondays.

By KAREN LEE ZINER

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — After more than 36 years, Amos House will be getting a new home. The nonprofit agency will hold a groundbreaking ceremony on Monday for a $6-million community center, scheduled to open in December 2015.

“It’s a new building for Amos House’s guests, for all of their needs,” president and CEO Eileen Hayes said Wednesday. Supportive housing will remain separate.

The agency provides support for Rhode Islanders who are hungry, homeless and in crisis, and operates the largest soup kitchen in the state. Since its founding in 1976, Amos House has evolved from grassroots soup kitchen to comprehensive social-services agency.

The four-level, 29,000-square-foot structure on the Amos House’s existing property will include a new soup kitchen with a larger dining hall, classrooms, community rooms, training centers and consolidated staff offices.

U.S. Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, who were instrumental in securing a federal earmark of $730,500 for the project, and Governor Chafee, will be among the guest speakers on Monday.

The ceremony will be at 10 a.m. on the construction site at 460 Pine St., behind the current Amos House soup kitchen.

“We’re really excited because it [the new building] will allow us to bring our programs that are located offsite into one building,” Hayes said.

“All of our staff will be in one building, all of our programs in one building. We’ll have a nicer environment in the dining hall and more consistent delivery of services for men and women and families who come to us for services.”

She added: “We’ve been trying to raise this money for the past five years, so we’re really excited to be breaking ground.” Construction actually started last month, she said.

“We’re just incredibly grateful to the funders of this project and donors who have made some very generous gifts to our campaign,” Hayes said. “We still have a ways to go. We need another million to build the reserve and furnish the building.”

Amos House owns 14 buildings, 11 of which are used for housing. Eight are at the Friendship-Pine streets location. Staff consolidation will free up more space for housing.

A full-scale carpentry shop and a classroom for the culinary program will replace the existing offsite locations. The literacy program will also move in-house.

The 1983 concrete-block dining hall will be torn down, and the space will be used for parking, Hayes said.

“The dining hall is very cold in the winter, and, in the summer, we can’t air-condition it. It’s not wired for air-conditioning,” Hayes said. With the new building, “clients will no longer have to leave the dining hall and go into an adjacent building for support services.”

The new dining hall will allow 20 percent more people at each meal, and the new building will allow Amos House to accept 30 to 50 percent more students in its culinary, carpentry and entrepreneurial programs.
“When the soup kitchen was built, we served 100 meals a day,” Hayes said. “Typically, on any given day, we serve 500 to 700 meals.”