Christmas lasted for one more day Saturday as people filled the pews of three downtown churches to sing Christmas hymns.

What if one weapon to fight homelessness was actually something very small, affordable and obvious? What if it just boiled down to providing a house? A tiny, tiny house? It would be too simplistic – by far – to say that this would erase homelessness. But various communities are experimenting with tiny-house villages for the homeless: providing very small, relatively inexpensive homes in a setting with access to medical and social services. Now a Spokane man is trying to get a project off the ground that would combine work-skills training with tiny-home villages on church or nonprofit land, allowing homeless people to work toward ownership of small homes themselves.

At the corner of West Third Avenue and South Howard Street, where drug deals are common and panhandling yields profits, the staff at Central United Methodist Church has a front-row seat to the issue of homelessness. The church is done waiting for someone else to come up with a solution to both sides of the issue: helping those who are homeless and cleaning up the downtown area.

It’s time to clean out that coat closet. Spokane Mental Health’s Homeless Outreach Team needs at least a couple hundred more men’s and women’s coats for its 11th annual Winter Wear Drive in conjunction with Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week.

Until recently, there were two things one could be sure to encounter at Shalom Ministries at the beginning of the day: hungry people and fresh graffiti facing the alley behind Central United Methodist Church. Shalom has been feeding homeless and low-income downtown residents in the basement of the church at Third Avenue and Howard Street since 1994, and program coordinator Holly Chilinski was getting more and more frustrated by the constant graffiti problem.