Extend The Light

Extend the Light is Listening House’s initiative to ensure that our doors remain open six evenings a week, offering warm meals, connection, showers, rest, and community to neighbors experiencing homelessness and deep poverty. For many guests, evening hours are the most vulnerable time of day. As shelters fill, public spaces close, and temperatures drop, people often have nowhere to go except unsafe streets, encampments, or temporary spaces that lack stability and care. Extend the Light exists to change that.

For years, Listening House has provided daytime and evening hospitality built on a simple but radical belief: everyone deserves to be met with dignity, safety, and unconditional welcome. Yet before this campaign, we were only able to operate five evenings per week, leaving two night's where guests did not have access to the warmth, stability, and community they’ve come to rely on. Extend the Light was created to meet that need directly.

On October 1st, Listening House launched Tuesday evening hours for the first time in our new building. Immediately, we saw the impact. Dozens of guests arrived on the very first night. Some came hungry. Some came exhausted. Some came simply to sit somewhere safe and warm. Others came because they knew they’d be greeted by people who know their names, their stories, their hopes, and their struggles.

With this sixth night of operations, our team has been able to offer hundreds of additional meals. Guests have access to showers, hygiene supplies, crisis support, connection with social workers, and opportunities to rest—something many people living outside rarely experience. The extra night has prevented crises, diffused stressful situations, provided emergency clothing and resources, and offered emotional and mental health support at moments when it was needed most.

Extend the Light is more than expanded hours; it’s expanded possibility. It’s the difference between someone spending a night alone in the cold versus being welcomed into a place where they can breathe, reset, and prepare for the next day. It is a commitment to create consistency, predictability, and compassion for people who have few stable places left.

The campaign’s name reflects both the literal and symbolic purpose: extending light—warmth, welcome, and community—into evenings that might otherwise be dark, lonely, or dangerous. Every open night means meals served, conversations shared, and lives touched in ways that can seem small from the outside but are profoundly meaningful to those who rely on us. It means a fresh set of clothes after a shower. It means a quiet corner to rest. It means staff and volunteers offering genuine connection. It means being treated as a human being in a world that often overlooks people experiencing homelessness.

Extend the Light ensures Listening House can sustain these Tuesday hours through winter and beyond. It supports staffing, meals, cleaning, crisis intervention, supplies, outreach, and all the unseen work that makes this space safe and reliable. It ensures that radical hospitality is not just a philosophy but a daily practice.

At its core, Extend the Light is about dignity. It is about community. It is about ensuring no one in St. Paul has to face the cold, the darkness, or the weight of the world alone. Through this campaign, donors, volunteers, and partners help us build a brighter, warmer, more compassionate city—one evening at a time.