Dear Friends,
As the weather turns and our days become brighter, I write to you with a message of hope! This winter, your friendship to DuPagePads saved lives and helped families and individuals with nowhere else to turn to have immediate safety and a path out of their homelessness.
When the snow started to melt, a friend asked me why I like early spring so much better than fall, and after a minute, I realized why: Fall means that winter is coming, and every winter I worry that people who are unsheltered will die in the Midwest cold. As across our nation it’s becoming harder for people who are living in poverty to make ends meet, we see more people come to us for help. About 8,000 people call our Access Line every year. We have 300 beds at our Interim Housing Center (IHC). While in some cases, we can help people with solutions outside of our IHC, like transporting them to stay with a friend or relative, we still have a waiting list, and each fall, it begins to grow.
Thanks to our very kind DuPage County Board, the DuPage Foundation, and a thoughtful group of incredibly generous individual donors like you, in November 2024, we developed a plan to not only keep our IHC up and running, but to meet increased demand through a hotel-based emergency winter shelter model.
A note from “Nora”, a first grader whose family is now safe at our Interim Housing Center.
And in December 2025, we also extended our hours at our Access Center in Wheaton to be open overnight and on weekends so people waiting to go into shelter could have a safe place to sit. These 15 chairs made a WORLD of difference. From December 20 to March 31, 186 people came through our doors at some point needing a safe and warm place to sit, and the opportunity to have a shower and a hot meal. The life-saving hospitality you made possible welcomed in a mom with 2 teenagers who are now safely at our IHC. It helped a woman with post-surgical wounds get life-saving care when she came to us scared and bleeding. You made it possible for a veteran to have a hot meal and connection with VA services. Your kindness provided an Uber, breakfast, clean clothes and a cheering section for a gentleman who came to us on a Friday and went to start his new job the following Monday. Most importantly, no one died alone in a tent or seated behind a train station in DuPage County this winter.
Thanks to your support, our staff saved lives at the Access Center this winter.
I am filled with so much gratitude to you, our donors, for allowing us to save lives through our entire continuum of services, from our Street Outreach services, which go out into the community to meet people in tents and street corners and connect them with help; to this winter’s overnight hours at our Access Center; to our IHC that gives a safe place to sleep to 300 people each night, including more than 100 children; to our Supportive Housing programs that provide about 162 apartments throughout DuPage County for persons with disabilities and domestic violence survivors.
From all of us at DuPagePads we thank you for continuing to make this life-changing work possible. I hope you will continue to support our work with a gift this spring so we can continue to save lives and end homelessness. We couldn’t do it without you.
Wishing you warmth, safety and hope, this spring and always.
Sincerely,
April Redzic
President & CEO