The new Goff Family Shelter in St. Augustine has space for up to nine families who are experiencing homelessness. | Noah Hertz, Jacksonville Today
Published on June 29, 2026 at 3:23 pm
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Help for people experiencing homelessness have expanded in Northeast Florida with the opening of the Goff Family Shelter in St. Augustine.
Operated by the St. Augustine Society, a nonprofit organization that runs other shelters in the area, the Goff Family Shelter is designed to accommodate entire families needing a place to stay without separating children and adults.
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When people lose their housing, separating families can have a detrimental effect on children’s mental and physical well-being, says Executive Director Judith Dembowski.
“Imagine being like 7 or 8, losing everything and then having to go somewhere where your mom is not,” Dembowski says. “This keeps families together.”
The new shelter is in the former headquarters of the Florida Southern Christian Leadership Conference on Washington Street in St. Augustine’s Lincolnville neighborhood.
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Even though the shelter is just opening its doors, shelter staff have already selected the first set of families who will occupy the 37 beds.
Dembowski says occupants are selected based on vulnerability.
“We’re going to take families who are in cars and camps before we’re going to take families who are doubled up,” she says. “We fill it up with the most vulnerable, and then we fill it up to the top. And then as people roll out, we just keep filling it up.”
The need for the new shelter
St. Johns County includes some of the wealthiest ZIP codes in Florida, but that does not mean the area is without people experiencing homelessness.
According to data from the latest local homelessness census, the number of unhoused people in St. Johns County has increased since last year.
Advocates acknowledge that the annual count is not a comprehensive measure of the number of people without stable housing, but the nonprofit St. Johns County Continuum of Care counted a 16% increase in unhoused individuals.
In 2025, the nonprofit counted 183 sheltered people and 133 unsheltered people. People living in sheltered homelessness are those with temporary housing in an emergency shelter or other facility; people living in unsheltered homelessness are living on the streets.
This year’s homelessness census in St. Johns County counted fewer sheltered individuals (from 183 in 2025 to 177 in 2026), but the survey counted 190 unsheltered individuals.
In addition to figures collected by St. Johns County Continuum of Care, the St. Johns County School District reported at the end of the 2025-26 school year that 357 students were living without stable places to sleep.
Numbers increased in other parts of Northeast Florida, too.
But those figures don’t tell the full story, says Dembowski, the St. Augustine Society’s executive director. The survey does not factor for the number of families living with others or arrangements where children areseparated and living with other family members.
That’s why the Goff Family Shelter’s goal is to provide more than just services to help families find a new place to live. Dembowski says the shelter’s case workers will help families find jobs, get their kids to daycare and provide other services.
“When you’re living in homelessness trying to figure this out, your primary focus is how am I going to feed my kids? How am I going to bathe my kids? How am I going to keep my kids from not being scared?” Dembowski says. “Once they’re here and they’re safe; they’re clean; they’re warm or cool; they can start to think about where do we go next.”
That’s a mission that Robert Goff and his family could get behind.
Goff, whose family owned an auto body repair shop, splits his time between Wisconsin and St. Augustine.
When he heard about St. Augustine’s Society’s plans to open a family shelter in addition to its two other shelters, he and his family got on board. In addition to federal grant funding and other individual donors, shelter heads say Goff family’s funding was instrumental to opening the shelter.
“To be something like that, it just struck a chord with me,” he said.
Last year, Goff says, his daughter Katie died, and he sees her compassion in the services the St. Augustine Society provides its clients.
“To me, when I drive past this place, this is like Katie’s place,” Goff says. “When I look at this, I feel like it’s my daughter.”
For people interested in learning more about the St. Augustine Society, Dembowski pointed to the monthly shelter tours the nonprofit offers. Go to the St. Augustine Society’s website for more information.
