A homeless encampment set up on the street across from an art gallery in Jacksonville, Illinois had been growing, facing harassment and threats from passersby.
The city was at a loss: How do we clear this space without forcing unhoused people to vacate the place they call home?
Together with the group’s leader, Jeffrey ‘Grandpa’ Grable, they formed an idea.
“We [asked], would you like to camp out where there is, showers, restrooms, water and electricity? And people said, ‘Yeah, that sounds good,’” Alan Bradish, the Jacksonville Police Department volunteer Chaplain, told KHQA News. “I said, ‘well, let me, let me look into it.’”
The group is now staying for a two-week camping trip at an official campsite at Lake Jacksonville.
The city had no financial involvement in the campsite, with anonymous organizations and churches footing the time, money, food, and transportation required to keep the group at the site.
A pastor lent his church’s van to help move the group to the lake, and an anonymous sponsor is paying the $12 nightly fee for the group to stay on the campground.
Here, they have access to electricity and showers. Plus, on the streets, the encampment faced harassment at night, especially towards the women of the group. Grable said that led the men to stay up at night to keep watch.
At Lake Jacksonville, they’ve been able to rest.
“It’s wonderful,” Grable told KHQA. “Really loving it, the showers are wonderful. Yes. Everybody’s clean and we’re working along getting clothes and getting laundry done and stuff like that.”
Contrary to chatter online, both the Jacksonville police and Grable said no one was forced to leave the encampment for the campgrounds.
“They were looking for a more peaceful alternative to what they had,” Bradish told My Journal Courier.
“No one’s been forced to leave, they have every right they want,” Jacksonville Chief of Police Doug Thompson added to KHQA.
“They just were given the option of going out there versus sitting in here and they all wanted to go out there. The only complaint I’ve heard so far was one of the individuals said, ‘the fish aren’t biting.’ Otherwise, it’s been pretty decent out there.”
Grable, an Army veteran who has been homeless since January — and joined the group in June — said they are “happy to get away from the madness.”
And despite other rumors that the group of unhoused individuals is causing trouble at the campsite, the Lake Jacksonville superintendent Brett Gilbreth told KHQA they have been “nothing but good people … kind and peaceful and nice.”
While the stay is temporary — Lake Jacksonville policy states someone can only rent out the space for two weeks at a time, and then they have to vacate for at least one week — local officials are working with Grable to figure out their next steps.
Bradish has been meeting individually with unhoused people at the campsite to create a personalized plan for their needs. Grable is using his social security money to save up to rent a house for the group.
“I’ve been doing this kind of thing all my life, taking care of people,” Grable told KHQA.
“I mean, I’ll go without to make sure you don’t. I’ll go without a meal to make sure somebody else gets fed. I say, if I can help you, I will. If you need a meal or new shoes or whatever, I’ll get ‘em for you somehow. That’s a promise.”
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Header image courtesy of Quang Nguyen Vinh/Pexels
