OSHKOSH (NBC 26) — Downtown Oshkosh will soon have a new police precinct, part of the city’s new homeless outreach program, Project Lift.
- Mike Goudreau bought the building on the corner of Algoma Boulevard and Market Street and will use it to provide OPD with a precinct space.
- Project Lift will pair a police officer with a Winnebago County Health and Human Services employee to connect people with homeless outreach resources.
- The program is funded by the adopted 2025 City of Oshkosh Budget as well as an annual donation from the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation.
A year ago, a group of business owners and organizations, including the Oshkosh Chamber of Commerce and the Oshkosh Visitors Bureau, came together to look at long-term and short-term solutions to homelessness.
“How to tackle that as a community and fight that together,” Karlene Grabner, director of donor services for the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation, says. “So that we are taking care of those experiencing homelessness in our community, the business owners' needs, visitors' needs and community guests in general.”
Split into long-term focused and short-term focused, the two groups met weekly for six months, according to Grabner. They examined what worked, and what didn’t, in other communities to try and determine what could be successful in Oshkosh.
“At the end we all came together, again, and came together with the same outcome that street outreach would be the best thing to try right now,” Grabner says.
Project Lift is funded in part by the 2025 city budget, but the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation is also donating $125,000 each year to pay for staffing and to rent a space for the precinct, according to Grabner.
Chief of Police, Dean Smith, says he was hesitant to have OPD lead the program, but there was not another organization that could take on the workload.
“Police officers are the only ones working in the field day in and day out,” he says.
Smith says the program will be similar to the department’s already standing behavioral health team, which uses an officer and outreach worker team to respond to mental health crises.
“Going to use that same model to work with our homeless population and try to help them find the resources that they need, potentially giving warm handoffs to community resources that are available to them,” he says.
The homeless outreach team will be stationed at a new precinct downtown, at the corner of Market Street and Algoma Boulevard.
“It’s not an intimidating building, it’s a welcoming building, and I think it will help whoever needs it,” Mike Goudreau, the new owner of the building, says.
Goudreau graduated from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh in the 1980s, and he raised his family in town. While he now lives in Colorado, he still runs a real estate development business with his sons in Oshkosh.
“This is a great town, we want to be a part of that,” he says.
Goudreau bought the building at 101 Algoma Blvd. with the intention of renting out a retail space on the main level. However, when he heard OPD needed a space for their new homeless outreach program, he didn’t hesitate.
“It was an easy decision to say yeah, let’s see if we can work together,” he says. “We want to make sure we are a part of the solution to make sure we have a vital downtown.”
The group of business owners and community leaders that came together to create the program– a group now called the Project Lift Task Force– will continue to meet at least twice a year, according to Grabner.
“And our purpose now will be no longer the idea generation, but the outcomes and the what now kind of conversations,” she says.
Smith says OPD has partnered with UWO to collect data on the program in order to measure its success.
“We’re going to try things, and if they don’t work, we’re going to try something else and we’re going to keep working at it to hopefully effect change within our homeless population,” he says.
