Home Sweet Home Ministries

The City of Bloomington will spend more than $500,000 to buy additional powdered-activated carbon in an effort to eliminate ongoing odor and taste issues with the water supply.

Home Sweet Home Ministries wants to build a shelter village — tiny sleeping cabins surrounding a community building — on a site near the nonprofit’s Bloomington facility.

Advocates say McLean County's homeless response system is inefficient and ineffective. They're trying to build a better one, but it's not happening fast enough.

Street outreach is a proven way to help end homelessness and efforts are growing in McLean County, but providers say they are still inefficient — and something else needs to be done.

Participants said they felt an added urgency to participate in the annual Home Sweet Home Ministries fundraiser, given McLean County's recent rise in homelessness.

WGLT will debut a new multimedia project this month ‒ including WGLT’s first-ever video documentary ‒ chronicling what it’s like to be unhoused in Bloomington-Normal during the cold winter months.

When it feels like 20 below zero outside people are advised to stay inside, yet advocates who help the unhoused are braving the cold in Bloomington-Normal to help the roughly 130 people they estimate have no place inside to call home.

A homeless encampment near downtown Bloomington that started growing around a year ago in an overflow parking lot is no longer. By end of day Oct. 15, the roughly 35 unsheltered community members who’d been staying there left and all signs of the encampment — tents, pallets, personal belongings — were gone.

The Immigration Project and Home Sweet Home Ministries shelter are teaming up to put roughly $700,000 to use in helping recent arrivals in Bloomington-Normal and the unhoused.

Many staying in the encampment in Bloomington cannot live in congregate shelter settings. And even if they can, the Salvation Army might not have enough room for them.