On a crisp Friday morning in October when I arrived at St. Paul’s Union Gospel Mission, CEO Pam Stegora Axberg was already on her seventh interview of the day.
Since 2 p.m. the day prior, Stegora Axberg had been hosting a livestreamed event called Conversations on a Bench, part of a 24-hour national faith-based movement calling attention to issues of homelessness, addiction and mental health.
Bundled up with a fire in front of her, Stegora Axberg told me she had spoken with people until just before midnight, then caught a few cold hours of sleep. She resumed conversations at 5 a.m. that morning.
Conversations on a Bench started in 2017 in Virginia, but Stegora Axberg brought the event to Minnesota last year to raise awareness of the state’s homelessness crisis and highlight local strategies to alleviate it.
“It’s a great way to have us come together and build relationships about what we’re going to do locally,” she said.
The event came at a time when demand for shelter is high across the metro even as more beds have been added over the past few years. Hennepin County’s “point-in-time count,” which tracks how many people experience homelessness on one night in January, reported 2,496 individuals in shelters or transitional housing programs in 2026.
The count found 427 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, though that data was collected in 2025 due in part to federal reporting requirements and also to safety concerns brought on by Operation Metro Surge. 2024 data from Ramsey County showed 1,234 people homeless with shelter, and 410 people without.
At the event, conversations centered on a handful of issues, including the overrepresentation in the homeless population of individuals who identify as Black, Latino or Native American, the ongoing opioid crisis, mental wellness and the general lack of available shelter beds or other housing options.
Heather Alden, the supervisor of Project REACH and Fostering Connections, St. Paul Public Schools programs for youth experiencing homelessness or out-of-home placements, said there are currently 44 families on the shelter waitlist in Ramsey County. If a family is unable to find shelter in the county, she said, they have nowhere else to go.
Stegora Axberg said Union Gospel Mission turns away two women for every one they can accept and, even with added shelter beds, the organization’s men’s campus is 99% full.
Rebecca Noecker, St. Paul City Council president, said at the event that she’s heard comparisons between homelessness and a game of musical chairs.
“The only reason [musical chairs] works is because you have not enough chairs for every person playing,” Noecker said, adding that homelessness is “not a game.”
Participants talked about solutions, too, like expanding the different types of available housing, building stronger peer support groups and providing different programs to encourage stability, like job training and addiction recovery.
Due to Stegora Axberg’s busy interviewing schedule, I was ushered onto the live feed to ask her my questions. But the script quickly flipped, and she asked me one in return: whether there was a certain takeaway I had been hearing that changed the way I thought about homelessness.
The producers behind the camera were already flashing the “one minute warning” signal, so I didn’t have a chance to answer this question to its fullest extent.
So, here goes.
Every single person I interviewed said the same thing when I asked them about the biggest misconception about homelessness. The misconception, they said, is that it can’t happen to someone with stable housing or a good financial situation.
Sheri Riemers, CEO of Ain Dah Yung Center, a St. Paul organization that provides emergency shelter to Native youth, captured it: “Homelessness is deeply misunderstood by the overall population, and for those that think that it can’t happen to them, [they] are starkly wrong – or should I say starkly misinformed or uninformed,” she said. “It can happen to anybody on any given day, no matter what.”
The post A novel, chilly effort to help end homelessness in the Twin Cities appeared first on MinnPost.
