ACCESS is Jackson County's Community Action Agency.

Our mission is to provide food, warmth and shelter to Jackson County's most vulnerable community members.

The Medford Severe Weather Shelter is a collaboration with the City of Medford and ACCESS.

The City of Medford is responsible for calling a severe weather activation.

Then we're triggered to start the operations.

We have the capacity to serve 64 individuals with beds, and we do our best to not turn anybody away.

When an individual is in need of shelter, they come in and we provide warm meals, bedding, a safe place to rest, and dry storage for their belongings.

The Medford Severe Weather Shelter relies on our community for volunteer efforts so that we can make sure we are available to our most vulnerable community in time of severe weather.

Without the community members of Medford stepping up to volunteer to help us with the shelter, we are unable to provide safe, warm shelter to community.

To run the shelter, we absolutely need to have volunteers willing to come in and you can help on a lot of different levels.

You can hand out food, can hand out bedding, you can help sign people in.

There's a lot of different ways to assist.

It truly saves lives.

They are able to stay here for the evening and then leave in the morning.

And the majority of the time, we're able to supply them with a hot meal and then something to eat on their way out.

I really like the fact that it's a low barrier shelter.

It's important because we have a lot of community members within our homelessness system that for many reasons are unable to connect to the sheltering system in other ways, and this is a service that they are able to receive when the weather is so intense that it could take their lives.