Guests of Honor: Safe Shelter’s Home Work

What if shelter wasn’t the end goal, but the beginning of coming home?

Join us as Christian Chambers of Safe Shelter breaks down how relationships and radical hospitality are redefining shelter in Asheville.

At Safe Shelter, people aren’t “clients.” They’re guests.

Led by community health workers and peer leaders with lived experience, Safe Shelter’s practical, wraparound support model centers dignity, trust, and connection. It’s a place where families stay together in all their forms. Pets are welcome. Community dinners replace isolation with belonging. And support goes beyond a bed for the night. We’re talking real pathways to permanent housing.

This is what home work looks like at Safe Shelter: real safety, real trust, real possibility.

About Christian: Christian Chambers is the Executive Director of Safe Shelter in Asheville, a community-driven nonprofit program of Counterflow that connects people to permanent housing through dignity-centered, holistic care. With both lived and professional experience navigating housing instability, Christian leads a team of community health workers and peer support specialists, building pathways rooted in trusting relationships, shared joy, and real-world support. He brings a deeply interpersonal approach to leadership, grounded in the belief that transformation happens through consistency, proximity, and showing up when it matters most.

Safe Shelter reimagines what it means to belong. And this conversation is a grounded look at what happens when dignity leads.

🎧 Press play to recharge.

🌐 Learn more at safeshelterasheville.org.

We'll see you same time, same place next month. Until then, peace.

Transcript

Welcome & Intro

Intro 0:03

We're profoundly, profoundly interconnected. We don't always live that way, we don't always acknowledge it. But if we're going to heal, we have to live it, experience it, and create institutions that celebrate. Can we create a we when no one's on the outside of it? Welcome to the UPLift with Tzedek: Real Talk for Real Change. Before we jump in, a quick reminder of why we're here and what we hope to achieve. We're here to build authentic community relationships and help fuel social transformation in Asheville, North Carolina. We believe collective liberation is not only possible but probable as we share, listen, and learn together. We're here for the process. However, the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.

Libby 0:49

All right. Thank you guys for joining us today on the uplift. We are so blessed to be in great company today. Today we have with us Christian Chambers. Christian is the executive director of Safe Shelter, a program of counterflow. Hey Christian, how are you doing today?

Christian 1:09

Uh wonderful and I'm blessed to be here. This is truly an honor.

Libby 1:13

Awesome. So Christian, can you well, first of all, are you an Asheville native?

Christian 1:18

No.

Libby 1:19

How did you come to Asheville?

Christian 1:20

I've been here for 21 years now. (Oh wow.) But I'm from New York originally. My dad is in sleep medicine, so he's kind of helping to start up some of that all over the U.S. And uh we ended up here. And I loved it. So I stayed.

Libby 1:36

Awesome. So tell us a little bit about Safe Shelter.

Christian 1:40

Yeah, so Safe Shelter actually started as Winter Safe Shelter in 2021. Um and it was just kind of a collaborative of people doing this work in this field um during Code Purple season where there was no Code Purple open. Uh and yeah, we just could sit by and do nothing. Uh so we collected mattresses and uh put together a little crew. And I I had just had my my daughter at the time. So I was involved in the beginning, but the staying overnight part, I couldn't do that because yeah, I had to stay up all day. But that's how it started back in 2021. Uh a lot of people in the community were involved. Uh, and then in 2023, we transitioned to year-round uh shelter in October of 2023. We've been rolling ever since.

What's Different at Safe Shelter

Libby 2:29

I kind of remember that beginning um because you all worked with a couple of churches as well, right? We've now evolved where safe shelter is a year-round programming. Can you tell me how does Safe Shelter address issues differently than what you might see in a traditional shelter?

Christian 2:46

Yeah, I think one thing is we're really about building community. Uh, we approach, you know, kind of case management in a different way. Also, it's a lot of people that have been in this field a long time that have learned through lived experience and a lot of ups and downs, highs and lows, failures and successes at other organizations. Uh, and they've kind of taken the best of what they have and brought it to safe shelter. So it's different in that way. It's different in that we allow any makeup of a family to stay together. Usually, if like a mom and a 12-year-old sudden try to get into shelter, they get split up. That doesn't happen with us. They get to stay together. No matter if it's grandmother, mom, child, grandchild, uh, they all get to stay together. So we're keeping the families together.

Libby 3:31

And dogs.

Christian 3:31

And dogs. We are the shout out. We're the first shelter um to allow animals without being service animals.

Libby 3:39

That was probably one of my, I feel like, greatest moments. I was volunteering and there was a family with a dog, and I was like, wait, that's a dog. And the lady that was helping, she's like, Yeah, we we accept animals too. Okay, cool. So can you tell me, is there any special type of training your staff goes through to, you know, really be intentional about being a safe space for LGBTQIA plus BIPOC transgender folks?

Christian 4:10

Yeah, I don't know if I'd say special training, but I would say because of everyone's lived experience, because our staff is made up of people um in the LGBTQ community, we just use our relationships to train each other. It's very genuine. Uh, you can call people in. That's like has been my dream for that's how staff to work, and it's worked beautifully so far. And also all our staff are most of them are peer supports, community health workers. Uh they've had, you know, mental health. They've had a whole bunch of training. But I think what makes a difference is just real people in real lives commuting with each other.

Libby 4:48

Actually, before we started recording, we were talking about the fact that a lot of people who have been just as involved face a lot of barriers, you know, not being able to get public assistance and things of that nature. How does Safe Shelter navigate that space where you have systems, legal systems that are oppressive to folks and really create the conditions for homelessness?

"Guests," Community & Culture at Safe Shelter

Christian 5:13

Yeah, so our big thing again is relationships. We have found that in every system, there's at least one person who is broader than system-minded. And so their relationship focused. And because of the makeup of our staff, a lot of them have been in this business so long or in this community for so long. They know these people, uh, since childhood, since they first got into the field. And so we pull on those strings, we pull on those relationships, and it's always reciprocal, you know. So we've been able to kind of infiltrate some systems, we've been able to kind of take down some systems from the inside um to uplift the people that deserve second chances.

Libby 5:51

So tell me about this word guests.

Christian 5:53

Yes. I've worked at a couple of different places uh where, you know, there's clients and I don't know, all the other words that you could use. But I think we found guests as like, well, one, we want people to feel like they're at home, but not. We don't want them to be stuck here, you know. So we continuously call them guests and they're invited in, they're treated as, you know, you would treat a guest like very well, top volume, bring out your nice china, and yeah, you treat everybody with like high respect because it's deeper than transactional. It's yeah, relational and community.

Libby 6:27

I love that. So when you're in this space, what type of tension arises when you're serving communities across identity differences? What what are the tensions that arise and and how do you deal with that?

Christian 6:39

There are tensions. Um but honestly, it hasn't been that bad. I don't think we've had really like any there's ever been like a physical altercation or anything like that. Again, because of the atmosphere we've created of community, you know. We have uh community dinners every Wednesday night, and everybody comes in where everybody's talking, playing games, eating and laughing. And I think like that push to get to know your neighbor, the person you're sleeping next to, kind of squashes a lot of the squabbles. And we learn from each other, and we learn from guests, and guests learn from staff, and yeah, again, it's that big thing of community that keeps all the drama down.

Libby 7:15

And so we are sitting in your community space right now. And as a CHW-led shelter, what types of healing activities and trauma-informed activities do you guys do in these spaces?

Christian 7:28

Yeah, we got all kinds of things. We got art classes that come through, playback theater classes. Uh, we're starting a parenting class. Uh, we've had a yoga in here, we've had community meetings in here, uh, movie nights. I mean, really anything you can think of. And we invite the community in to use the space for whatever, and then they invite our folks down. So, yeah, community. We just love the community.

Libby 7:51

How do your guests inform your culture and your policies and what happens in this space? Thanks, yeah. The whole culture of the shelter.

Christian 7:59

Oh man, that's a good question. I I feel like because we are really building community, we kind of adapt. Whenever we get like a new crew, like if it's like a whole bunch of new people, we just adapt. And so everybody's figuring out boundaries, what it looks like. It's a little different every time. Sometimes we're like, oh no, no, don't touch the coffee pot. And sometimes we're like, yeah, go ahead, make 10,000 pots. But even through those journeys, people build trust. And so for somebody who comes in and we're like, oh no, don't touch the coffee. And maybe two weeks, three weeks, we're like, yeah, go ahead and make a cup of coffee. Those little things build like the culture, build the trust. And then all of a sudden, you don't have to be looking over your shoulder all the time or like watching everybody because that's not what we want. Right. Sometimes we have to reset. I think one of the most beautiful things is during the summer, we were outside playing soccer almost every day. We had kids, adults out there, and it was like they would trickle down more and more every week. And by the end of it, we're all like out there sweating, and it didn't feel like shelter or at like work. It just feeled like it was like, oh, this is my group of people that we're just out hanging out.

Libby 9:05

Like community.

Christian 9:06

Community. That's community. Give back the community, yes.

Finding Home

Libby 9:09

So tell us a little bit more about that journey. How did you come to this space in West Asheville?

Christian 9:14

Yeah, I mean, we were over at A Hope for a while for six months, uh and that was super helpful. There was challenges, and also, I mean, it was beautiful place to start. And then we're just moving from church to church. Grace Episcopal, super helpful. We stayed there for a month. Trinity, I think we stayed here twice. First Presbyterian. They've been so great and so helpful. Um, but we had to pack up and move every 30 days, which was like a pain and also exhausting. But then we ended up back at Trinity right before Helene hit. And yeah, it was, you know, devastating. But all my staff showed up without communication. We were like digging trenches to make sure water didn't flood the church. Then they let us come over here so it can be a distribution hub. And we got, we were flooded with donations. And then they were like, you know what? Let's get a little contract together. Y'all can go ahead and stay. So in October of uh 2024, this became our permanent home.

Libby 10:10

Beautiful. So it sounds like you guys have had a lot of faith-based places supporting the work. How do you deal with that inside the shelter? Because if you have a lot of faith-based places supporting work, that means you probably also have people of lots of different faiths coming in. Yeah. But how do you build community across faith? Yeah, across race, across identity.

Advocacy & Collaboration

Christian 10:33

Yeah. That Wednesday night dinner, come and listen, come and learn, come and see. Almost everybody that's come to a community dinner has stuck around. All you have to do is sit with somebody, look them in the eye, and have a conversation. And that's affected both guests and, you know, faith-based organization. I feel like a lot of people are looking at things in a whole different way. Things they wouldn't have agreed with before or they were opposed to, or even they still might be opposed to, but they see the human. They see the person. I think that's something that really makes us unique and different is that even though we have all these faith-based organizations of every denomination, they have been really good about listening and hearing and being slow to speak. And so yeah, that's that's been fantastic, really.

Libby 11:14

Are there any specific advocacy efforts you guys are involved in right now that we should know about?

Christian 11:20

I mean, we're really just advocating right now for the there's some funds coming in from Helene just for really deeply affordable housing. And that's a part of a larger thing that we want to help change the culture, I guess, of Asheville. Um you could be in low-income housing or or public housing or anything like that. And you could own a house, reach for the stars, like you could own a business. There's people that were here, that work here, that have been in institutions and institutionalized and been in jail and prison, and they own businesses now and things like that. So we just want to change that culture to be like, no matter that it looks like you're getting pushed out, we want to be advocates to invite you back in. And some people have been like, oh, you're not from Astral. You should stay in your lane. And I'm like, try me. You know, I mean, as in, this is my community. I'm in it, I've been living it, and you know, check the stats. We're in it for the long haul. And we've gone up against huge systems that other people can't because they're reliant on them. Uh, we're kind of like rolling free, so we can we can do some things, yeah.

Libby 12:26

Before coming to have this conversation with you, we were visiting with our friends at Deep Time and met a pretty awesome young person who is preparing to move from Safe Shelter, who's been here for a while now. And one of the things that I think was so impressive as I was listening to this young man talk was thinking about how organizations like Safe Shelter and Deep Time are forming relationships outside of their own organizations to be able to support people beyond just the thing that you're doing. Can you talk a little bit more about the resources and the partnerships that you've developed that really help your guests be able to get on their feet and move forward?

Christian 13:12

Yeah, again, it's been like really relational. We know people from so many other organizations, like personally. So I could just list off like Appalachia Mountain Health, Lisi with the free clinic uh downstairs. Like, you should like write prescriptions, do wound care and things like that. Haywood Street Respit, deeply connected to them, homeward bound, Salvation Army, RHA. I mean, all these places, we have somebody that we've known from day one. It's all about just we can make that call, you know, and like, hey, I know this is what the process looks like, but we need this, you know, this person needs this. And they trust us that we're not just making a referral. We we have a relationship with these people. Um, we're gonna be honest about, you know, the level of care they might need. But the partnerships make all of this work, uh, the collaboration. And yeah, there's some people that don't want to collaborate. And uh I think it's really apparent. When you stand alone, you stand alone. But when you're together, it's strong, very strong.

Liberation–Outcomes & Impacts

Libby 14:08

I love that. In your eyes, what would it look like to transition from not just being a shelter, but being a place of liberation?

Christian 14:16

Ooh. I mean, I feel like we're headed that way. All the resources right here on campus, like childcare, barbershops, and uh yeah, deep top across the street. I think what's liberating, shout out that we have a 70% or 76% housing outcome when people leave here. And the HUD standards 30%. So we are above and beyond. That's liberating even when people come here, because they're like, I have a high chance of having my own place when I leave here. And it's not, it's not always just income-based housing or public housing. It's like homes, rentals. We have relationships with personal landlords that have come to dinner and been like, oh, I'll give this person a chance. The reason I'm in my apartment right now, or in the place that I live, is because somebody donated a refrigerator and he was like, Oh, also, I'm renting out my house. Would you let? And I was like, right on time. Perfect topic. So it's a liberation, not just for the guests, but for staff. And what we're constantly pushing forward is we love doing shelter and creating community, and also we want to create community outside of shelter. So we're pushing for again deeply affordable housing, owning land so that we can be the ones with the say-so instead of having to rely on people who are money first, relationship second.

Libby 15:30

The transformational versus the transactional.

Christian 15:33

You got it, yes.

Safe Shelter Resources

Libby 15:35

So I want to ask a clarifying question in terms of shelter, the sleeping and living spaces upstairs. And then you have lots of other things happening downstairs. Talk to us a little bit about that. What happens in this hub down here?

Christian 15:47

We have this hub. We got a daycare that happens right here from like three to six years old. We got a homeschool cooperative, and that's about from six to seventeen. They just let the kids come down. If there's like a day off of school, school's closed, they'll be open. Kids can come down, hang out, the parents can go to work, or just relax. We got a barber shop. So he did back to school cuts for free for all the kids and the parents, which is super cool. And then we got uh the consignment shop right next door. I remember a kid that came in, his stuff was ridden with bed bugs. We threw it all out, he got the girl on a shop exfree in there. And then we have our clinician that at the front where we offer free clinical anything. And then again, downstairs, there's all kinds of groups down there: the Pansy Collective, uh, Appalachian Medical, Solidarity. And so, yeah, they can get uh the things they need that they didn't have access to because they were just in survival mode. So you come here, you get to take a breath, start to make a plan to move forward. And Tracy uh is right over there in her office. People come down, they work on their goals, set their goals. I mean, it's got a full income fixing experience, and that's what we strive for.

Libby 16:53

That's what it sounds like. It sounds very holistic. You come here not just to lay your head, but it really is to kind of restart. Yes. Right? Yes. Take a break, take a breath, let your nervous system settle, and then get the support that you need to move forward. Absolutely. That's beautiful.

Christian 17:10

I think a big difference maker too is there's people that look like other people. Boy, it makes a difference. First of all, you look like me, which means I can just let my guard down a little bit. And then, oh, you've been through what I've been through, or you've been through worse. Um, and look at where you are now. Just the difference that makes. I mean, and I just encourage organizations to really look at that and not just picking people like, oh, you're black or you're brad. I actually don't like the phrase "Black excellence." I just believe in excellence. There are some excellent people who happen to be Black that do this work. I mean excellent. And the impact I've seen them make on people that would not have even engaged in these services, incredible, phenomenal.

Libby 17:57

So tell us a little bit more about you, Christian. Why is this work so important to you? And what do you do outside of this work?

Christian 18:05

It's kind of blurred lines, to be honest. Uh-huh. But for me, it's in the best of place. Some people are like, all right, hard boundary. I'm going home. I'm not really like that. But most of the staff isn't like that either, which makes the burden light. So we can call each other at 12, 1 a.m. We're like, hey, this thing's going off. And five people will respond, I'm on it, you know, and it's vice versa. It's reciprocal. So and then I got my two little babies, you know, my seven-year-old, my four-year-old. I love spending time with them, my, you know, girlfriend. It's the family. That's like, I love it. And also, they come here a lot. My kids are here playing with all the other kids. And I love that because they've always been with me and all this stuff. But this is like, I feel super safe. They just disappear sometimes. And I'm like, yeah, everything's fine. Um, there are people looking out. But me personally, I've dealt with housing instability for a lot of my life. I was a household of six, and we shared a two-bedroom apartment. You know, my parents slept in the living room. Uh, we had one car, and my dad's driving an hour away to go to work and coming back. And obviously, we're in a much better place now. And just going through that, I was like, I just I don't want other people to have to experience those things if they don't have to. It's not costing me that much to do this work. Sometimes I wish that was the sentiment in the towns that I was in. But I feel like that's why I did it. I love doing it. I love building relationships with people. And there's there's a guy that I worked with for some years in day shelter, and he transitioned into housing. He got housed. I helped him get housed, I helped him uh get disability, I helped him with all this stuff. He had just come out of prison. He was like lolling in the day center, and I like came down and told him some joke, and then we were just cool ever since. And he was telling his case manager, you get cut off at a certain point. They're like, all right, you go back to what you were doing, and the case manager will take it. The housing case manager will take it from here. And he would like text me and be like, I need more support, I need more support. Um, and he committed suicide uh because he felt like he was alone and unsupported. And I think that moment was like, if I get to make the decisions, I which is what ended up happening, I have to be somewhere where that can't be allowed to happen, where these boundaries that we've set that are ultimately unhealthy, they don't exist. We're seeing people for people and not clients. I think that's what really pushed me over the edge to be like, oh, you can do this. So yeah, that's a little bit about me.

Libby 20:35

Yeah, it speaks a little lot to this whole idea of impacted leadership. Those of us who have the lived experiences and we work in these areas for that reason, because we don't want to see other people have to live the things that we've lived, and we also want to support those folks who often go unheard, yeah, unseen, unnoticed. So I just want to say thank you for all the work that you all do here at Safe Shelter. And you thank Tzedek, but uh the bigger thanks is owed to you and your crew here at Safe Shelter. I don't know that people really understand what it means to be a community health worker-driven shelter, where the people who work here aren't just people working here, they're people impacted by the conditions that are happening in our community. So thank you so much for all that you all do, the ways that you show up.

Partnerships That Move People Forward

Adonis 21:25

I'm Adonis. I met Christian Helene. I started volunteering at Safe Shelter because they were doing some really amazing mutual aid, our community healing and repair work, providing those resources, and it became a hub for community leaders and folks and individuals to come get resources and dis distribute them to their community. And I saw him in action. And at the time, Safe Shelter itself was still housing folks in the basement of Trinity United Methodist Church. Here in West Asheville. And I started to learn a bit about the work that they were doing and how they kind of operated. They were just trying to do something different, specifically for families and folks that had a hard time navigating traditional shelters. It was encouraging and inspiring work. And for me, honestly, just to be transparent, when I moved here, I came here in search of some change and some recovery. So I had actually had experienced for a brief time being unhoused and navigating that space. And so the opportunity to kind of pour back into that community at a time when I had just kind of gotten to the other side of that in my own personal journey just felt like a big blessing and a win. And so it just felt aligned. And I just I respected him just seeing a Black man doing and leading that in a way that I hadn't seen a lot in this community just at the time, especially being new here, and leading with integrity and just without needing any kind of like highlight or shine. There was no time for stopping to like be any kind of self-serving whatsoever. It's literally generally every fiber in his being was like, What can I do for somebody else? They had opportunities for to hire some folks and gave me a job. And so Christian became my boss. And again, like his leadership style is completely zero ego, 100% impact. At the same time, he's also very, very intelligent and very strategic and connected. Like I he'd done the work with a few different organizations in the past. And so it built a lot of relationships where people trusted him, if nothing else, his ability to show up and contribute to spaces. And so I saw the organization grow. I saw this, you know, I saw Safe Shelter be able to sustain with little re with little like actual funding and resources just based on folks being willing to like focus on the work. Like he just will roll his sleeves up and do repairs himself, paint the walls themselves. I love Christian. I've not seen that many examples of somebody that lead with a true selfless spirit. He's not interested in talking about it. He does not want recognition. He does not want shine. He's not flashy. He gave me the car that I have, like he gave it to me. It needed just some brakes and stuff. And I and he's like, Here you can have a car. You know, you know, you know, your car messed up after the storm. Here you can have this one, just get the brakes fixed. Just gave it to me. That's just him. So I really enjoyed working there. It's all love. I love him like a brother. I would do anything for him because he literally would do anything for the people that that he loves and that he's supporting, which is anybody that's in need, anybody that's unhoused um in the community. He's just really about the work and with the smile. And he's brilliant and funny. You know, he comes from some rough, like he grew up extremely impoverished in New York. And so he understands, you know, a lot of what it's like to navigate systems and barriers and to come on the other side of it. And so he just wants to kind of bridge that and like be that bridge, like let safe shelter be that bridge for the guests that come there to understand that their current situation doesn't have to be what's final and that there's a there's a bridge to permanent secure housing. You know, there's no time frame. So if it takes six months, or if it takes six weeks, or if it takes six days, like the approach is the same. Like we're gonna love you, we're gonna provide this safe space for you, and we're gonna work with you, the community health workers and stuff, and to build a plan that like works for you, that leads to getting you to a place that you feel equipped and ready to move on and support you through that. I love the work there. I love how he leads. I love him. That kind of leadership is what this community needs, that kind of transparency. And again, for a young black man that's navigated all that he has, to still have his spirit and that willingness and that light and smile that he always has. I think it's I think it speaks to like how he was raised and knowing what he's overcome and being anchored in kind of gratitude and and purpose. One of the most mellow, chill, intelligent, wonderful people that I know. He's great people for sure.

Wrap UP: Getting Involved!

Libby 26:02

Yeah, and the world's a better place because you all are in it. So thank you. How can people become more involved in Safe Shelter?

Christian 26:11

Go to the website, you know, safe shelterasheville.org. There's ways you can donate there if you want, but really just show up. I mean, we're here almost all day, all the time. Especially again, Wednesday nights on community dinner nights. You can come at six and uh just get to know the folks, get to know the staff, and then find ways to plug in. It could be very simple things, you know. We just invite people in and wherever you feel led to eat, serve, come serve.

Libby 26:37

And let me make sure I heard that correctly. So every Wednesday night is like community dinner night. Yes, right. And anybody's invited to come in. Anybody's invited. Okay, cool. Is there anything else that you would like to share?

Speaker 4 26:48

Uh I'm just grateful for this opportunity. Uh Tzedek was one of our like outside of like the money that we got to get going, y'all are like one of the first people to, you know, give us any kind of any kind of money. And we're like super grateful for that. It let us believe we're like, oh, we could do this thing, you know. Um, and then just caught momentum after that. Uh I know Safe Shelter's really special place. I think collaboration, a relationship, community is our thing. Um, and again, I I invite people to get involved, collaborate. I invite organizations and individuals.

Speaker 3 27:23

Thank you.