High Point day center offers showers, clothes for unhoused residents

At 2018 W. Green Dr., a small High Point center is doing the kind of work that can keep a crisis from spreading to hospital waiting rooms, police calls, libraries and storefronts. The Oakwood Community Day Center gives people who are living on the street, in cars or in encampments a place to shower, get a haircut, pick up clean clothes and shoes, use computers and charge phones and tablets.

The center is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the city of High Point lists it as an active warming center even though it is not a shelter. On White Flag nights, the center also has opened overnight for women and children only, adding a short-term safety net when temperatures drop and the need spikes.

The service model is built around immediate needs, but it also fits Guilford County’s broader homelessness strategy. The county says its annual Point-in-Time count tracks both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness during the last 10 days of January and sends that data to HUD, helping officials decide what services and resources are needed. Nationally, the backdrop remains stark: more than 745,000 Americans do not have a permanent home.

Inside the Oakwood center, the offerings go beyond hygiene. It has provided food, clothing, transportation and help with utility bills during the winter, when basic costs become harder to absorb. A grant from the High Point Community Foundation is helping Oakwood through its first year, giving the nonprofit breathing room as it builds the kind of daily routine that can keep people connected to help instead of slipping farther from it.

The center was first proposed in 2023 as a day center for people facing homelessness in High Point, with plans for showers, a salon station, a clothing closet, meals and case management. It opened in early November 2025 inside the building that houses Alleluia Ministries International Church, and by January it was seeing about 5 to 10 people a day.

For High Point, the payoff is practical as well as humane. Kevin Sanders and Ericka Sanders built Oakwood after earlier efforts to take food to encampments showed that meals alone were not enough. Oakwood’s formal footprint is still recent, with a provider activation date of May 30, 2025, but the center has already become part of the city’s winter response and a small, visible relief valve for a broader community need.