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During the COVID-19 pandemic, Deacon Ed Irelan was getting a flood of phone calls from people who had been released early from prison. Irelan runs the prison ministry for Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Toledo, so people were turning to him to ask for help when they had no place to go.
“I was getting calls saying, ‘I’ve got 30-50 dollars in my pockets, no where to go and no where to stay,’” Ireland recalled, adding that many of them were ending up sleeping under bridges, in cemeteries or in the woods…