William’s House of Hope secures building

ANTIGO — A new homeless shelter will be in Antigo soon.

William’s House of Hope is a nonprofit that began following the death of a local homeless man in January. The organization recently signed a contract to purchase the old Pearl Vision building behind Two Angels, according to Vice President Dylan Johnson.

“We have rented the building with the contingency to purchase,” Johnson said. “I believe in three months, we should own the building is the goal.”

He said the building — a one story structure with a variety of differently-sized, divided rooms — met all the criteria he and other William’s House of Hope leaders had wanted in a shelter.

“We’re just going to have one major open room that we’re going to put a ton of cots in — I think our goal is to house 30 people at a time,” Johnson said. “But the separate rooms will be used for specific purposes. One might be used for case management specifically, one might be used for families or something like that. But generally, individuals could coincide in that one main area. It will also be fully staffed with volunteers.”

The homeless shelter falls into the B3 zoning category, according to City of Antigo Building Inspector and Zoning Administrator Beth McCarthy.

“It’s the same as a hotel or a motel — it’s not a permanent residence,” McCarthy said. “But you can do all sorts of things in a B3 district. It can be a medical clinic or a dental office — our zoning has a whole bunch of permitted uses.”

Johnson and employees working for his business Northwoods Painting have decided to donate roughly $8,000 in labor, the majority involving interior painting, to remodeling the building before it opens. He said he made the decision due to his own past experience of being homeless.

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I just hadn’t found the correct opportunity for it,” Johnson said. “Now that we have this building and I looked at it yesterday, I just thought about it overnight and thought this is something I can do that’s going to help William’s House of Hope, help the community, and it’s the best way I think Northwoods Painting can give back to the community at this point in time.”

Though Johnson said the organization has not yet raised enough funds to purchase the building outright, he believes they soon will in part because of a number of upcoming fundraisers, including Shelterfest, a family-focused event featuring games, raffles, food, face painting, and a bouncy house at the Heinzen Pavilion June 14 starting at 3 p.m.

“I’m really not worried because we have had so much success in our fundraisers so far, and we have so many more on the horizon,” he said. “Also, a lot of the grants we wrote were denied because we didn’t have a physical location, so now we’re circling back to all these grants and trying to procure funds that way, so I think it’s going to be very attainable.”