With temperatures dipping into the 30s overnight and no shelter for the hundreds who sleep in the woods of east Orange, a nonprofit is opening an overnight shelter on Tuesday and Wednesday nights near Bithlo to help keep people warm — amid hopes it can provide many more nights of support to come.
Eventually, United Global Outreach CEO Tim McKinney said he plans for the two-acre property on East Colonial Drive to be a permanent homeless shelter – a move that would make it the only general shelter in the county outside of downtown Orlando. He said both short-term and long-term options are necessary, citing the lack of any county-run warming center on the east side.
“We must provide an option for people overnight,” McKinney said. “I don’t think any person who lives in east Orange County thinks it’s OK for a person to sleep outside when it’s 35 degrees.”
It’s too soon to say whether McKinney can realize his dream of a permanent shelter. The property’s zoning hinges on a lawsuit between the county and state involving Orange’s rural growth control rules. While such facilities also tend to draw neighborhood opposition, a key reason there are so few shelters in the area now, he suspects this site might be different in a more sparsely populated area.
The group is opening the doors of a former church it leases, as well as a few adjacent motel rooms on the property, for people to come out of the woods and into the warmth.
Volunteers and workers spent Tuesday afternoon setting up cots and bringing over air mattresses into what was a church’s worship center. McKinney said he suspected they’d have between 30 and 50 people each night.
His outreach staff was fanning out into known encampments in wooded areas across Bithlo and east Orange to let people know about the available space. Later they said they would drive people to the warming center.
McKinney said he decided to open the space out of frustration that Orange County hadn’t provided a warming shelter in the Bithlo area, where he estimates at least 800 people sleep in encampments scattered through the vast woods. The nearest such center is the Goldenrod Recreation Center, about 15 miles away.
United Global Outreach CEO Tim McKinney, gives a tour of an old church and former motel that the non-profit will use as temporary shelter for the homeless due to the freezing weather forecast, on Tuesday, December 30, 2025. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel)
A county spokesperson said it had partnered with Lynx to provide free transportation from United Global Outreach’s Transformation Village to the Goldenrod warming center, with pickups each day at 5:30 and 7:30.
When the county warming centers opened Nov. 10, 111 people stayed overnight at Barnett Park or Goldenrod.
But Brian Postlewait, the Chief Operations Officer for the Homeless Services Network, said people tend not to be willing to move too far from where they typically live – even for warmth.
“People out east are not going to travel to a homeless shelter in downtown Orlando because their lives are out east,” he said. “We could have more accessible shelters, but I believe that the county is working in good faith with the Homeless Service Network to increase access to warming shelters as the climate in Central Florida continues to be volatile.”
Postlewait noted that, unlike most homeless shelters, warming centers allow pets and a person’s belongings – typically a barrier to people on the streets accepting shelter.
United Global Outreach recently signed a five-year lease for the east Orange property with an option to extend it five more years, with the intention of opening the only shelter in Orange County not located in Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood.
Before it was a church, it was a bar and a motel. Its peculiar background means it has a kitchen, plumbing, restrooms and a handful of motel rooms.
But it still needs renovations to be ready for year-round use, and the property’s zoning is also tied up in legal action trying to overturn the county’s rural growth controls and Vision 2050 plan. Still, McKinney was optimistic.
“It’s going to happen, “ he said. “We’re going to get it done because the need is so great.”
He intends for the shelter to operate as a transitional space, where people can come out of the woods and move into drug or mental health treatment programs. He wants the site to be well lit and buffered from neighboring properties and busy Colonial Drive.
He first informed local officials of his plan earlier this year at a regional homelessness meeting. The proposal drew applause from Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who for years has urged other cities and counties to build shelters to provide options beyond his city’s limits.
“The reality is that in east Orange County, if you have any wooded area whatsoever, even if it’s only the size of this patio, you have or you will have a homeless person living there,” McKinney said. “This is going to be like nothing we have going on in Central Florida.”