Every night, Lisa Sheltra, Director of Community Engagement at Salt & Light Ministries, sees someone sleeping on the sidewalk outside of the Urbana-based retail and grocery store.
“Almost every night when I leave work here at 8 o’clock, I’ll see somebody bundling down to sleep on our sidewalk here overnight,” Sheltra says. “Because there’s no place else to go, right? There’s no place else to go.”
Housing instability is only one of the issues Sheltra sees impacting the people of Central Illinois in her work at Salt & Light, an organization working to fight poverty in Champaign-Urbana through volunteer credit programs, small group meetings, classes, and training opportunities.
Originally an emergency food pantry, Salt & Light has grown to help people in need gain a sense of community through their volunteer credit program, where program participants volunteer at Salt & Light to gain store credit.
Sheltra identifies other issues affecting Central Illinois as “the gap between wages and cost of living, the availability and affordability of housing, and the sheer dysfunctionality of the systems that we are using to try to help people.”
There is a significant disparity between employment opportunities and the cost of living in Champaign-Urbana, Sheltra says.
“It is really possible to have a full-time job and work as hard as you can and just really still not be able to make ends meet,” she says.
Sheltra says this discrepancy causes dependence on government benefit systems.
“As soon as you have to start to depend on assistance programs to supplement your financial bottom line, what you discover is that those systems penalize you for working,” Sheltra says.
She discussed the benefit cliff, a sharp decrease in public benefits due to increased income.
“[Maybe] you find a job that makes a little more money and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s that’s great because I’m going to be able to get my head above water a little bit,’” she says. “It’s [going to] result in getting your housing benefits cut and your childcare benefits cut and your food stamps cut.”
The benefit cliff causes holders to start relying on the subsistence-level living that government aid programs provide, Sheltra says. This aid is often not enough to cover the basic cost of living.
Sheltra uses the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as an example. SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, are intended to function as a supplement to an overall grocery budget.
However, that is often not the case of the people Sheltra works with at Salt & Light.
“I understand that it’s intended to be supplemental, but unfortunately, in the broken system that we’ve created, for many people, SNAP benefits are their grocery budget,” Sheltra says. “People are often in such dire circumstances that it’s not functioning as supplemental. It is the core of people’s food budgets.”
In July 2024, 15.4 percent of Illinois residents received SNAP benefits from the state of Illinois, according to data from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the United States Census Bureau.
Illinois’ percentage is slightly higher than the 12.3 percent on SNAP benefits nationwide, according to July 2024 data from the United States Department of Agriculture and the United States Census Bureau.
“At work, I’m hearing people telling me that they get as small an amount as $16 a month in SNAP benefits,” Sheltra says.
This issue applies to other social welfare programs as well. Many elderly or retired people living in poverty rely on government aid, Sheltra says.
“If you are elderly, and … [benefits] are your only income, and you think, ‘Hey, I’ve learned a lot in my 70 years of life.’ … ‘I can find a job that I can do and bring in some income,’ your … [benefits] are going to get cut for that,” Sheltra says. “If you live in one of these subsidized housing [complexes] for seniors around here, your rent is going to go up. It’s the same system.”
Sheltra also discusses housing insecurity, a nationwide issue punctuated by rising housing costs in Central Illinois.
“The University [of Illinois] brings a lot of talent, money and resources into our community, but also drives up housing costs, such that people just simply can’t afford to pay rent,” she says.
According to the 2024 National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Out of Reach report, “In no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage, or the prevailing state or local minimum wage, afford a modest two-bedroom rental home at fair market rent.”
In Champaign County, 279 individuals were identified as homeless in 2024, a 64-person increase from 2023, according to the Continuum of Services Providers to the Homeless.
“I think there is no excuse for a community this size and this well-resourced to be doing such a terrible, terrible job with housing,” Sheltra says. “The shelters are full, or they’re scary, or they’re places [that aren’t safe for] people in recovery. And we don’t have enough. There’s not remotely enough.”
The City of Champaign has two main adult shelters: Strides, a low-barrier shelter with space for 50 male-identifying guests and 14 female-identifying guests; and C-U at Home, a mid-barrier shelter for eight women and 16 men.
“C-U at Home is doing great work in this area. There was a lot of resistance when they transitioned away from being a low-barrier shelter, but it’s really hard to do any kind of developmental work when people are in active addiction or suffering mental health conditions that prevent them from being able to make changes,” she adds.
“We just need to do a better job with homelessness and housing. This community … we just don’t have what we need,” Sheltra says.
Sheltra’s goal is to develop Salt & Light into a model for other systems when addressing wide-scale societal issues.
Salt & Light is “a space where people are able to come together in a shared community effort, where everyone is getting the benefit of this space, and everyone is contributing to that benefit,” Sheltra says.
“We are trying to build something here that we think should be a model for the way things should work,” she says. “We would never have said [during the first ten years], as an emergency pantry, that we want this to be the model for the way the world should work. But we can say that about the work that we’re doing now.”
Additionally, Salt & Light offers volunteer opportunities for community members and organizations.
Volunteers do everything from sorting clothes to working in Customer Service. Salt & Light’s Urbana location accepts volunteers older than six, while their Champaign location takes volunteers above 18. Find more information here.