When it’s completed sometime next year, the two-story community building at Jeremiah Community will feature gathering spaces, medical and counseling offices, a pantry/store and a commercial kitchen.
Less obvious from the floor plan shown during Tuesday’s City Council work session are the potential jobs it houses.
“A lot of the services that are baked into this building are also secret workforce development opportunities,” Micah Executive Leader Meghann Cotter said of the approximately 8,000 square-foot space on Wicklow Drive in the Bragg Hill area of Fredericksburg.
The commercial kitchen, for example, could be used by downtown restaurant owners to train residents of the supportive housing community “in a sheltered space before we then launch them into their restaurants to be dishwashers and cooks,” Cotter said.
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Micah Ecumenical Ministries is offering bus tours of the supportive housing community. Sign up here.
The nonprofit SAWs Virginia, which builds custom wheelchair ramps, plans to move its design headquarters into the building’s basement. Other on-site training possibilities include landscaping and laundry, she added.
“This wider network of people who need to train employees would love to hire our people, but our people need a lot of TLC sometimes before they can move into a traditional job,” Cotter said.
Jeremiah Community, which City Council approved in January 2025, has raised $11.9 million of a $17.5 million capital campaign goal. That amount covers construction of the first 50 small home units, the community center and seven years of operating costs.
“It gets us up and running, gets us an opportunity to get some of our systems in place and learn what we need to learn about operating it while we’re continuing to raise money for the future,” Cotter said.
The project got a boost in the form of an MOU agreement between Micah, Mary Washington Healthcare, SupportWorks Housing and the city back in 2022.
Cotter opened her presentation with statistics outlining the homelessness crisis in the Fredericksburg region. On a given night, 60-80 people sleep outside here, and 178 have no true home.
“And it’s expensive to do nothing about that,” Cotter said, citing a cost of housing an individual for one year is about $12,000, compared to $35,000 in public services — police, EMS, etc. — received when they’re on the street. That population — the chronically unhoused — is who Jeremiah Community seeks to serve.
The project draws heavy inspiration from Community First Village, a supportive housing community in Austin, Texas. Several Micah staffers have visited that community to participate in a “replication cohort,” Cotter said.
Micah has also gained experience from Hesed House, a bridge housing facility in Fredericksburg, and from the recent leasing of Berclair Estate in Spotsylvania County that’s housed 12 people.
“It’s actually become this really wonderful opportunity to practice on small scale what it means to be Jeremiah Community,” Cotter said. “We’ve learned a lot about what it means to operate these single sites,” she said.
According to Cotter, Micah recently submitted its second site plan to city staff and aims to break ground at 0 Wicklow Dr. in November. The first Jeremiah Community residents could move in around Christmas 2027.
Several councilors expressed excitement over the project’s progress, with Will Mackintosh (at-large) stating he’s proud to see Fredericksburg “at the leading edge nationally” of solutions to the homelessness crisis. For Cotter’s part, she’s not aware of any similar projects elsewhere in Virginia.
“I think it’s something we should be shouting from the rooftops,” Mackintosh said.
Meghann Cotter is a member of the Fredericksburg Free Press Journalism Advisory Committee.
