Horizon House providing winter assistance for people who are homeless
The Indianapolis agency says it sees at least 200 people a day and is calling for coat, blanket and cold-weather clothing donations as temperatures drop.
Horizon House, an Indianapolis agency that connects people experiencing homelessness with services, says it is seeing at least 200 people a day as winter weather sets in, according to WISH-TV.
Beverly Bell, the guest service supervisor at Horizon House, told WISH-TV that roughly 6,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Indianapolis. The organization operates a "day room" that opens as a shelter from the cold whenever the temperature drops below 10 degrees Fahrenheit or the wind chill falls below zero.
The retrieved WISH-TV report does not specify how the 6,000 figure was calculated or over what geographic area or time period it was measured; that context was not included in the coverage as published.
What the agency is asking for
Bell said Horizon House needs donations of heavy coats, blankets, socks, underwear, scarves, gloves and gently used clothing to get people through the coldest months, per WISH-TV's reporting.
The framing
Bell described the day-to-day reality for the people Horizon House serves as urgent enough that staff try not to dwell on their own comparative comfort. "This is real life for them. I try to not complain because I have somewhere to go," Bell said, according to WISH-TV.
What it signals
The day-room threshold Horizon House uses — opening whenever wind chill drops below zero or the air temperature falls under 10 degrees — mirrors the kind of hard weather trigger that homeless-service agencies across cold-weather U.S. cities rely on each winter to decide when emergency shelter capacity has to expand beyond routine operations. The scale Bell described, 200 people in a single day, points to demand that runs well beyond what donated winter clothing alone can meet, even as it remains one of the few concrete levers a donor-dependent agency can pull quickly.
Part of a wider Indianapolis effort
Horizon House's winter push fits into a larger, longer-running challenge for the city: a 2022 review of Indianapolis's homelessness response, reported by WFYI, described a persistent shortage of permanent supportive housing — the kind of stable, service-linked housing that groups like Horizon House work to connect people toward once emergency needs, like surviving the cold, are met.
Horizon House itself operates as a long-running Indianapolis service hub connecting people experiencing homelessness to case management, meals, mail service and other day-to-day supports beyond the cold-weather day room, according to the organization's own program materials. The Clowes Fund, a Indianapolis-based philanthropic funder, has counted Horizon House among its grantees, citing the organization's role providing direct services to the city's homeless population.
Founded in 1988, Horizon House runs year-round programs well beyond the winter day room, according to the organization's own materials cited by the Clowes Fund, a local philanthropic funder that has supported the agency: showers, laundry and mail service for people without stable housing, case management for people returning from incarceration, a street outreach team, an employment-readiness program called R.I.S.E., and a permanent supportive housing track aimed at people with chronic illness, disabilities or substance-use challenges. The agency reports housing-retention rates above the national average for that permanent supportive housing program.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by WISH-TV Indianapolis, with additional context on Indianapolis's broader homelessness response drawn from WFYI's later reporting and Horizon House's own program materials. It restores a story originally published on this site in January 2022; figures are as reported at the time.