How We Started
History
Late in 1987, as the last of the fallen leaves were crushed under his footsteps, B R Hogan made his way to the bleachers of a local high school football stadium. Those were his last steps, taken just hours or perhaps minutes or maybe just moments before he took his last breath.
Immediately after his body was found the next day, word spread. The first question asked was how did he die? Next came a far more compelling question: how did he live? We don’t know much about Mr. Hogan, but we do know that he died in a way no one should, and with great sadness in their hearts, many in the community felt that perhaps he lived that way as well.
A commitment to life was the community’s response to Mr. Hogan’s death. The Marietta-Cobb Winter Shelter opened its doors in 1987 to anyone threatened by the cold.
Within a short few years, crack cocaine was destroying lives and tearing families apart in our community. The threat expanded and so did we. We saw firsthand that homelessness is not so much a problem as it is the symptom of a problem. For most homeless men and many homeless women in our community, that problem is addiction and its causes.
In 1995 we took the first tenuous steps towards making a real and lasting difference in the lives of those who came to us for help. As the winter came to a close that year, we took the top bunks off of our Korean-war surplus beds and with little more than a dream and a commitment to see it realized we kept the last of our winter shelter guests who would match our commitment to them.
Operational Benchmarks
In 1993, the Marietta-Cobb Winter Shelter transitioned to a community-supported long-term residential recovery facility to support individuals experiencing homelessness, and was able to open a women’s facility in 2009.
Key Moments:
1987: The Marietta Cobb Winter Shelter opens its doors
1993: The MCWS purchased the building we had been leasing on Church Street Ext.
1995: We begin year-round service and change our name to The Extension. We obtained a grant to hire a part-time counselor and began to build a program that ties the organization’s potential to that of the people we serve.
1999: After paying the last of our 60 payments on our first mortgage, we officially owned our first building on Church Street Ext.
2001: We completed construction of a new building next to our existing building, bringing the number of men we could serve to 47.
2009: We opened the Barbara J. Crafton Center, our 20-bed women’s facility. This program filled a huge void in the community by serving women who did not have custody of their children or those who had grown children or none at all.
2011: The Extension is licensed by the Georgia Department of Community Health.
2018: An off-site housing initiative is started which adds 14 new beds to the program. Clients who were nearing completion of the program are offered a chance to live off-site, while continuing to receive services at our men’s and women’s facilities.
2022: We break ground on the 22,000 sqft expansion to the Men's Campus that will increase our capacity by 70%.
Operational Capacity
