The long-running dispute between a St. Croix nonprofit that caters to the territory’s indigent and unhoused population and the historic church it occupies intensified this week when the V.I. Marshal’s Office served an eviction notice and gave the nonprofit until Wednesday to leave.
The Collective Collaboration has operated out of the parish hall of Christiansted’s historic St. John’s Episcopal Church for more than five years, the nonprofit’s founder and president, Karen Dickenson, said during a small protest outside the church Tuesday. Dickenson said they feed approximately 200 people every day. In a video message shared to supporters over social media, she said the nonprofit made a verbal agreement with the church’s former senior warden to use the premises but that the arrangement was never meant to be permanent. Dickenson said the relationship changed when new members came on board.
Representatives from St. John’s Episcopal Church did not respond to multiple requests for comment Tuesday, but court records show the church sued Dickenson and the Collective Collaboration in September 2022 in a bid to reclaim the property. According to a civil complaint penned by the church’s junior warden, Derek Joseph, the original agreement allowed the nonprofit to use the building — located at 33 Company Street — from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and TCCI violated the agreement by “allowing individuals to shelter and reside on the premises.”
Superior Court Judge Ernest Morris Jr. — then a magistrate judge — sided with the church, writing that “any agreement for a term of more than one year must be in writing, and there was no writing between the parties. Furthermore, the Court noted that the Defendant’s own testimony indicated that she moved forward with sheltering persons in the space without any specific approval from the Plaintiff.” Morris gave the nonprofit until January 2023 to vacate and “secure appropriate alternate placements for those being sheltered on the premises.”
Two months ago, Superior Court Judge Denise Francois denied the nonprofit’s request for an emergency motion to stay the 2022 judgment.
The 2022 episode came months after lawmakers in the 34th Legislature appropriated $325,000 from the Community Facilities Trust Fund for the V.I. Property and Procurement Department to buy a nearby property and lease it to Collective Collaboration for one dollar per year. The move was broadly supported by lawmakers as well as testifiers from DPP and the V.I. Human Services Department, whose then-commissioner, Kimberley Causey-Gomez, said the demand for shelter beds, transitional housing and permanent supportive housing “far exceeds the available resources here in the Virgin Islands.” Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. signed the measure into law as Act 8579 in August 2022. According to the text of the bill, the funds remain available until expended.
“We’ve tried. We’ve tried to find places,” Dickenson told the Source Tuesday. “I’ve submitted two lease with the government, then we’re waiting for the government to decide. That was like four years ago, when some building that the government had — we tried to … buy a building down the street, the government indicated that they would go ahead and step in and purchase it. We’ve been waiting for an encroachment issue for the last two years, and it’s just been going on and on and on and on and on.”
Dickenson claimed that the decision to remove the nonprofit was rooted in “either retaliation, jealousy, but I know most of all, it’s money.”
“You can’t control my money,” she said. “I don’t get government assistance. I want to make it clear to the public. And if you have some documents to say that I get government funding — bring it, let me see it, please. Because I don’t. We have been doing the work of a yeoman.”
The loss of any outreach services or shelter beds — even unsanctioned ones — would be deeply felt in the territory.
During a March hearing of the Senate Housing, Telecommunications and Transportation Committee, lawmakers heard that 304 unsheltered people were identified during the territory’s most recent Point-in-Time count, a nationwide assessment of people experiencing homelessness during a single day in January, which is required by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. That figure included 185 people on St. Thomas, 98 on St. Croix and 21 on St. John, but testifiers noted that it was almost certainly an undercount.
Dan Derima, executive director of the nonprofit Meeting the Needs of Our Community and chair of the V.I. Continuum of Care Council on Homelessness, said that a 2023 inventory of beds identified 16 emergency shelter beds, 53 transitional housing beds and 23 permanent supportive housing beds.
“Interaction and collaboration between government agencies is in crisis mode — not much is in place to address the issues at hand,” he said at the time. Derima also said that the Continuum of Care had trouble securing its HUD funding from the local partnering agency, the V.I. Housing Finance Authority, and that an expected technical assistance grant was terminated by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency.
