While providing people facing homelessness access to housing is easier said than done, Tina Rounds, CEO of LaGrange-based nonprofit BEDS Plus, described the organization’s main goal for 2026 simply.
“It’s a new landscape, but what we’re trying to do is take the resources that we have and help as many people as possible,” she told the Landmark. “As a community, we’ve got to stick together and try to make sure we’re still helping people regardless of national problems and structural changes. If there is a person in our community who is homeless, we’re responsible for them.”
BEDS’ chief advancement officer, Terri Rivera, said in August that federal cuts to rental and food assistance programs could increase the number of people experiencing homelessness. Rounds said the nonprofit’s walk-in center in Summit, which is open noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, sees “upwards of a thousand visits a month.”
She said things could continue to get worse, as some cuts that were approved last year are set to go into effect this month, including those to the benefits people receive on Medicaid and tax credits for immigrants.
“It’s all a system that’s built independent on one another. You start taking some of those Jenga blocks, and the whole tower falls, right? The whole tower has not fallen yet, but there’s a whole lot of anticipation that that is going to occur,” Rounds said. “People are worried. They don’t have good information. The systems that they rely on are changing, and it’s caused upset. It’s exacerbated things that were already occurring, like the elevated rent and affordability crisis that’s well-known and documented.”
Rounds said the federal administration’s changes to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, which provides funding to nonprofits and other entities fighting homelessness, “dramatically changed the [program’s] priorities” and regressed its model to one used decades ago.
She said the program typically offers notices of funding opportunities on an annual basis, which became biennial toward the end of 2024, but the most recent notice led to lawsuits due to the regressive constraints and being offered “out of cycle” in December 2025.
“There were things that have been long-held, like permanent support of housing, and particular interventions and approaches to work that were racial equity-driven and that allowed people to get into housing before they had all their problems solved,” Rounds said. “All that stuff was taken off the table. The new approach is very much therapy-first, and maybe [you can] earn your way back into public benefits, [which would be] a short-term benefit. This is going back, literally, 30 years; we had a system like that, and then it changed to a different system, and now the new system that was proposed is going back.”
Due to the pending lawsuits, Rounds said BEDS must operate “under a certain amount of uncertainty” in regard to forthcoming funding.
“We’ve got contracts personally with our agency that go through the fall of 2026, and we’re expecting, based on the continuation of this two-year commitment, that we would get that same contract for 2026 into 2027, but a lot depends on this court case. That is about 25 or 30% of our overall funding profile,” she said.
Without the federal subsidies, BEDS may have to cut some housing programs entirely, Rounds said.
Despite the challenge facing down the organization, Rounds touted two big accomplishments from last year.
“We identified and secured funding for a fixed-site, motel-based shelter. We purchased a roadside motel, and then we secured all the funding, which is about $14 million, to renovate and make it a state-of-the-art shelter. We should start construction sometime in the next 90 days. That was probably our biggest accomplishment,” she said.
“We instituted late last year this walk-in center. It was a big commitment. It wasn’t directly funded. We just created the system, and it’s made a big impact,” she added. “We want to give the lowest-barrier access to anybody who needs help and give them the time with professional staff and do what we can to meet their needs internally or give them a solid referral and transportation to a place that can help them.”
