The collective · 6 agencies across North Carolina
Someone answers, every hour of every night.
Shelter, court advocacy, counselling, and a crisis line that never closes — for anyone affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking or trafficking.
1 January to 30 June 2026
What that looked like.
The gap
424 times, someone asked for a bed and there was not one.
These two bars count different things and are shown at the same scale only to give the second one its weight: the left is people served across every service, the right is requests for a shelter bed that could not be met. We do not publish a “people sheltered” figure, because counting nights — which is all a shelter census can honestly do — cannot tell you how many separate individuals those nights belonged to. A turnaway is the figure most funding reports never ask for, and the only one that describes what more money would actually buy.
Capacity
Roughly one night in 4, a shelter in this collective had no bed left to offer.
247 of 1,086 shelter-nights across 6 organisations were at full capacity during 1 January to 30 June 2026.
A shelter at capacity does not stop the phone ringing. It changes what the advocate on the other end is able to say.
Who those beds held
39% of every safe night was slept by a child.
Children arrive with a parent and are counted separately because their needs are separate — school transport, childcare, a bed of their own. Funding that assumes a shelter serves adults is funding that runs out.
Beyond the shelter door
Most of this work happens before anyone needs a bed.
Answered at any hour, by a person. No record is kept of who called — not a number, not a name.
In schools, churches, clinics and workplaces — the work that reduces the number at the top of this page.
Where these numbers come from
Counted once, at the source, and checked three times.
If you are going to quote these figures, it matters how they were produced. They were not assembled from spreadsheets emailed to a central office.
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Counted where the work happens
Each organisation records its own bed nights and turnaways on its own server. Nothing about the people served ever leaves that building — not a name, not a date of birth, not an identifier, not even a scrambled one.
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Reduced to counts, small counts hidden
What leaves is whole numbers for a closed period. Any figure below five becomes “fewer than five”, and a second figure in the same group is hidden with it so the first cannot be recovered by subtraction.
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Signed by the organisation that produced it
Each organisation signs its own figures with a key only it holds. Those signatures travel with the numbers all the way to this page.
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Re-checked and re-added here
This site verifies every signature independently and adds the totals itself rather than trusting the total it was handed. If one figure had been altered anywhere, this page would publish none of them.
Some totals appear as a range. That is not vagueness — it is the arithmetic of protecting people. A hidden count is never treated as zero, because that would erase the very people the protection exists for.
Reporting this period
6 organisations, one set of figures.
- Safe Harnett
- Lee County Dvsa
- Moore Family Refuge
- Sampson Safe Haven
- Hoke County Hope
- Cumberland Care
The gap is the whole story.
Every dollar of new funding is spent against the number in red first.
For funders and partners
See the system these numbers come from.
A guided walkthrough of how member organisations record bed nights and turnaways, how the figures on this page are produced, and how they are verified before publication. About thirty minutes, or click through it at your own pace.
The demo uses figures from fictional counties. It contains no record of any real person — there is no such record for it to show.