Beacon of Hope Gospel Rescue Mission was started in 2014 by a group in Yreka, California who wanted to do their part to help assure that no one was without shelter in the harsh winter months.

The winter of 2013 broke local records with temperatures dipping as low as 8 degrees in Siskiyou County. Many of our citizens worried how people with no way to get inside at night would survive such weather, and the truth was, many did not. As the weeks went by, we learned of first one homeless person who had died, and then another, until by the end of winter, several were gone. It was a heartbreaking problem. 

So when Michelle O’Gorman posted an announcement in the Siskiyou Daily News inviting interested parties to attend a meeting on January 22, 2014 to discuss possible solutions, 35 people showed up from every sector of our community. This was the beginning of Beacon of Hope Gospel Rescue Mission. 

One of our first tasks was to run a count of local homeless by sending out teams to take surveys to all the places we knew of where they could be found.

On April 17, we took this information to the Yreka City Council, and asked permission to build a rescue mission within the city. The council decided we could build, provided we locate the mission within M-1 zoning. 

In December of 2014, a home on Miner Street was generously donated to Beacon of Hope.

Most of us had more dreams than experience in helping the homeless, and as we worked to form them into a workable plan, we realized we needed two plans: 

A long-term plan for Hope House, a center that would offer not just an environment where un-housed citizens could survive but where they could thrive, with spiritual support, medical, dental and mental health care, life skills training, and resources to help them find jobs and homes.

A realistic short-term plan. Keep them alive through the winter with warm, bare-bones overnight shelter, and offer spiritual support and resources to help them get on their feet. 

We made plans to begin hosting overnight shelters from November 1 to March 31 of 2015, and, since Beacon of Hope did not yet have a home of its own, we approached the churches of Yreka to ask for the use of their buildings a rotational basis. Three churches responded: St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Mount Zion Lutheran Church, and the Yreka United Methodist Church. Shelters were held in these locations and also at the Yreka Community Resource Center. 

That first year, we ended up closing the shelter a couple weeks earlier than we planned, due to problems keeping peace among our guests, and the resulting difficulties retaining volunteers willing to host. We made plans to re-open in winter of 2016, putting to use what we learned that first year. We introduced a breathalyzer to be used upon entry, we set rules and policies. We were gaining that much-needed experience we lacked: our education had begun. 

In June of 2017, after an extensive search for a suitable property on which to build Hope House, we purchased the lot on 480 S. Foothill Drive. In December of that year, we purchased a pre-fab building that had previously housed Sheriff’s department offices, and had them moved to our property. 

On June 27, 2019, we were granted a building permit, and we broke ground in August of that year.   

The winter of 2020 has been the first year we have been unable to host a shelter, due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. We simply did not have a space available that would allow for the social distancing called for.

Our History