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Chum, which operates the largest emergency shelter for people experiencing homelessness north of the Twin Cities, has received a $2.5 million grant from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund. It’s the largest private gift the Duluth-based nonprofit has received in its 52-year history.
The grant is part of $102.5 million distributed to 32 organizations nationwide this year by the foundation started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and philanthropist Lauren Sanchez Bezos.
Since it was founded eight years ago, the fund has awarded more than $850 million in grants to nonprofit groups in all 50 states, including to several Twin Cities organizations. They include St. Stephen’s Human Services, Simpson Housing Services and The Link, all of which operate in Minneapolis, and Solid Ground in White Bear Lake.
This is the first award given to an organization in greater Minnesota. It was also a huge surprise to Chum and its executive director John Cole, who said he had never heard of the foundation before Chum was invited to apply for a grant. In fact, Cole said the Fund’s original email went into his spam folder.
Chum applied for the grant, but Cole said he had forgotten all about it until he received an email this weekend.
“I was stunned,” Cole recalled. “I was really overjoyed. This is a once-in-a-lifetime gift that will certainly change the trajectory of many lives.”
Cole said Chum will likely use the grant to expand its Emergency Family Shelter and to offer more support services for parents — and more programs for children — to provide assistance as they move toward stability.
"We don't want any children sleeping outside, and we want to be able to move families from shelter to permanent housing in a much faster and more efficient way. And so when we can get resources injected into our shelter operations, this really helps us to move further along in achieving these objectives,” Cole said.
Chum was founded in 1973 and opened its Emergency Shelter, Drop-in Center and Food Shelf in 1983. It also offers street outreach and, in 2014, opened a building with 50 units of supportive housing for individuals and families who have experienced homelessness.
The organization served more than 8,000 people last year through its various programs, including 46 families and 110 children.
“That is unconscionable that we could have children out there having to wrestle with homelessness because of the situation their families ended up in,” Cole said.
Earlier this year, the group began construction on an expansion of its emergency shelter located on Duluth’s steep hillside above downtown. The $10 million project will add two stories to the facility and double its capacity.
The shelter was built to serve 30 people, but it regularly served 125 people every night, forcing many to sleep on chairs, at tables or on the floor.
Chum has opened a temporary facility at another nearby service provider, the Damiano Center, while construction is ongoing. The new expanded shelter is expected to open in late 2026 or early 2027, and will serve around 160 people.
Chum also manages a winter warming center in Duluth, and it runs the Safe Bay program, which provides a secure area for people to sleep in their vehicles during the warmer months.
Duluth, like many cities around the country, has struggled with a rapidly growing homeless population since the COVID pandemic. Encampments sprung up around the city, including one outside Duluth City Hall and the St. Louis County Courthouse.
Business owners and downtown workers have raised concerns about panhandling and safety. The city council has passed several public safety ordinances aimed at addressing those issues but declined to make camping on city property a misdemeanor crime.
Chum and other service providers say there simply aren’t enough beds and services available for the number of people experiencing homelessness.
“We’ve been seeing a dramatic increase in chronic homelessness,” Cole said, while at the same time, traditional funding streams are shifting and shrinking. That’s why grants like this are so important, Cole said, when “we're constantly in a battle to try to piece together the combinations of funding from a wide variety of sources to enable us just to operate.”
Chum’s board of directors and staff will decide how best to use the grant from the Bezos’ foundation, which Cole said is designated to address family homelessness over the next five years.
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