Post Event Press Release: Homeless Shelter Top Donors Fuel Abuse
DareToStruggleCT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, September 18th, 2025
Contact: Mike, Dare to Struggle – CT
Post Event Press Release for Donor Campaign Press Conference
On Monday, September 15th 2025, Dare to Struggle and Homeless Liberation Initiative held a press conference in front of Thomaston Bank in downtown New Britain. We reported back to the media on our campaign to pressure the top 5 donors of the Friendship Service Center (FSC) to echo our demands regarding the ongoing mistreatment of residents there. Through email and phone zaps, we asked donors to leverage their power and request a report from the FSC detailing exactly how the shelter would meet our demands. We gave donors 3 weeks to get back to us. Here are the donors, their most recent contribution, and their response to our emails:
American Savings Foundation / donated $80,000 in 2024 / no reply.
Community Foundation of Greater New Britain / donated $20,000 in 2024 / “thank you for your email” no further communication.
Farmington Bank Community Foundation / donated $12,500 in 2024 / no reply
Connecticut Foodshare / $10,000 in 2024 / no reply
Thomaston Savings Bank / $1,000 in 2024 / “Received! Thank you!” no further communication.
None of the donors wanted to investigate these claims of mistreatment. This information was reported back to the 11 people that were present at our press conference along with 2 journalists. Jessy, a former resident from 2020, spoke about how the center should have its funding removed until the mistreatment stops, citing his experiences of having case managers run away from him when he’d ask about the status of his housing. One Dare to Struggle member read a speech written by Elijah, another former resident who was at the FSC up until this past March. It listed multiple things that needed to be fixed at the FSC and how complaints would go unanswered / how he would face backlash for making complaints. The speech stated the importance of donors holding the FSC accountable and continued with, “Your donations do not support the people this center claims to serve. They line the pockets of staff, pad budgets, and disappear into ‘administrative costs.’ Meanwhile, the residents — the people these donations are meant for — remain in unsafe, degrading conditions.”
We ended the conference with a few chants aimed specifically at Thomaston Savings Bank, one of the donors that is right in downtown New Britain where many FSC residents hang out. We wanted residents to see that we were confronting one of these donors. From here we will continue exposing cases of mistreatment at the FSC that we hear about and add it to our ongoing documentation until the mistreatment stops. Most recently, this would be when the FSC’s mismanagement lead to a homeless disabled women, named Laura, losing her bed (Instagram Video).
Six months ago we made our demands to the FSC clear, none of which have been met. They are:
Stop kicking people out. Work with residents to prevent evictions from happening in the first place.
Stop banning people from the facilities to receive necessary services.
Stop retaliating against residents and clients who speak up when something is wrong, act on, and investigate their complaints.
Crack down on staff members with complaints against them and fire repeat offenders, take complaints seriously, and properly vet who you hire.
Move funds from directors’ six-figure salaries to programs for the homeless and increased pay to front line staff. Address the concerns of front line staff.
Treat residents like human beings, from the quality of food, to day-to-day interactions with the staff, to health and safety living conditions.
Below is our ongoing documentation of mistreatment at the FSC:
Issue #2 - How New Britain’s shelters treat the Homeless
Issue #4 - “What they did to us destroyed our life. They almost broke us.”
Issue #5 - Transitional Housing – Lies and Mistreatment
Issue #6 - Bed Bugs at Friendship Service Center!
Issue #7 - 3/10 Rally Against Shelter Abuse - FSC Calls Cop
You can see how the FSC executive's greed gets in the way of providing adequate services in our article on the matter: "Shelter Directors Chase The Money and Leave the Homeless Behind"
See also the below links for further evidence of their oppression and repression:
Homeless Shelter Directors Go After Library Worker's Job for Speaking at Our Rally https://www.instagram.com/p/DJSWaxIyL9r/
Public Forum: How We Can Stop the Attacks on the Homeless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax-26GPe5Hk