The Third Place QC is now in its second year in a singular mission of providing vital services to a growing unhoused population.
The warm, welcoming drop-in center at 2000 3rd Ave., Rock Island, celebrated its first anniversary Oct. 1, 2026, and plans to move and grow by Dec. 1, to the vacant Abbey Station, about 11 blocks east, the historic former train depot at 3031 5th Ave., Rock Island.
“December 1st is an incredibly aggressive timeline, and I'll be shocked if we can pull it off by then, but we might,” The Third Place co-owner Christie Adamson said Friday, Oct. 2. “We're a pretty committed bunch around here.”
There will be very little interior renovations needed for the space (a former banquet hall and special event center), Adamson said.
“The space has been well maintained, so it's still very functional on the inside,” she said. “We have to do a few security-related things, some additional cameras, lighting, some landscaping outside, and then really setting up operations is what's going to take us the most amount of time. So no, we will actually be doing no renovations there at all.”
Adamson and Cloey Miller, who both had worked for Humility Homes & Services, are the only full-time employees for Third Place, which opened Oct. 1, 2025, originally 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., but switched by March to 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., with one-on-one appointments between 1 and 3 p.m.
When they first opened, they expected to serve about 40 people a week. The nonprofit is dedicated to creating a sense of community, warmth, and dignity for those experiencing housing instability. Its goal is to provide a safe and supportive environment where everyone feels valued and respected.
“Pretty much right after opening, we had to start reevaluating our services right away because we were already serving 70 or so people a day,” Adamson said Oct. 2. “And so part of what had to change was we kind of thought we would have some time during the day to do admin stuff, keep the place clean and organized, and that all shifted.”
“We changed our hours at one point early on to be open less hours so that we could do that. And then we changed our hours to 7 to 1,” she said. “Because every morning that I got here, there was people lined up. People are getting up when you're sleeping outside. The minute that any of the world starts to kind of rise, you're getting up too. So I noticed that we had a growing number of people who were in line waiting to come in before, you know, an hour or so before we even opened.”
The other reason that they changed hours was so that from 1 to 3, “we could take appointments with people that needed more assistance than we could provide during the day,” Adamson said. “So there are some things we can get to during the day that are case management related, helping direct people to the right places, some food stamp applications, notary services, etc. But none of that— nothing beyond that, none of the deep work that needs to happen with people we had time for.
“Housing applications take longer, sometimes just sitting down with people to figure out the layers of the barriers so that we can figure out kind of where to start,” she added. “Sometimes that's some crisis management with folks. It really depends. Sometimes we're in meetings, you know, we have obviously other meetings that are with partner agencies or funders or whatever.”
On Oct. 2, 2026, The Third Place posted on its Facebook page:
“Over this past year, we have met hundreds of people and heard hundreds of stories. We have celebrated new jobs, new apartments, sobriety milestones, birthdays, first bank accounts, reunions, new beginnings, and countless little victories that may seem small to some but mean everything to the person experiencing them.
“We have served thousands of cups of coffee, connected people to housing and shelter, helped with healthcare, identification, employment, benefits, hygiene, clothing, transportation and so many other needs. We have provided a place to rest, charge a phone, store belongings, get a haircut, laugh, cry, celebrate, and simply be human.
“And we have learned that sometimes the most important thing we can give someone is not a service or a resource. Sometimes it is simply a place where someone knows they belong.
“And now, one year later, The Third Place is growing again. None of this would exist without YOU. To our guests, volunteer, donors and funders who believed in an idea before they could see what it would become: thank you!
“To the businesses, churches, organizations, community groups and individuals who have shown up with donations, resources, encouragement and friendship: thank you.
“And to the entire Quad Cities community who has believed in the mission of The Third Place: THANK YOU!”
While a Rock Island Downtown Alliance worker donated fried chicken for guests Friday, The Third Place is not a meal site. On Oct. 1, Miller and Adamson were surprised with a first-anniversary party, which featured a good amount of food.
“We talk a lot with our guests about everything. We really try to be as open with them as possible. And so they knew how hard it was for us to get our doors open last October because a lot of challenges with the city of Rock Island,” Adamson recalled.
“We've been talking a lot about our year anniversary. My mom and dad volunteer down here every Tuesday, so a lot of folks have gotten to know them, and they went behind our backs and they got my mom and dad involved.”
“So we had balloons and a banner, and aside from all of that, the most meaningful thing yesterday was one of our regular volunteers who's a guest here, Jay, had handed out all of these like note cards to all of our guests, and all of the guests wrote on those note cards how much they've loved the Third Place and how important Cloey and I have been,” she said.
Adamson said she was deeply touched by that gesture.
“The most incredible thing, we live in downtown Rock Island, my husband and I do. These folks, for the most part, also do, and the amount that my world has grown and expanded and been enriched by knowing my neighbor, by knowing my neighbors,” she said. “We say hi to a lot of people, whether they're people we know because of having the business down here or whether they are unhoused folks. But my life and my family's life is definitely enriched by the privilege that it is to know these folks.”
“There's an enormous amount of isolation and loneliness in homelessness. And when you feel alone and isolated, you don't have any hope,” Adamson said of working to provide that hope.
“If you don't have hope, you don't have anything. It's why we celebrate birthdays with people,” she said of her guests. “If you're unhoused, not only may you go days without anybody saying your name out loud, you very likely have spent a birthday without anyone even knowing that that was the case.
"So we do something really simple, which is when it's your birthday, we acknowledge it and we let you DoorDash whatever meal you want to The Third Place. And so we have DoorDashed Mexican food, seafood boils, whatever. Sometimes people just want— could I just get a whole pizza to myself? Yeah, yeah, because that matters.”
No state or federal support
The Third Place (named because it’s not home or work, but a third place) doesn’t get any federal or state funding, but mostly local support – including from the Doris & Victor Day Foundation, Rock Island Community Foundation, Moline Regional Community Foundation, and one of its largest funders is Rock Island County 708 Mental Health Board, and lots of private individual donors.
Nearly all people who are unhoused are dealing with some type of mental health challenge, in part just because being homeless is traumatic.
"But diagnosed mental health conditions, on average here, that's between 30 and 40% of the population we support," Adamson said.
While they started seeing an average of 70 people a day, that’s grown to up to 150 per day, Adamson (who worked 12 years for Humility Homes) said.
“In the decades that I've been doing this work, I have never in my career, even during COVID seen the number of new people entering the homeless system as rapid as it has been in this last year,” she said. “We see too many new faces, and it's not like they're coming from Muscatine or Chicago, which is a common ignorant narrative that we sometimes hear.
“These are people who live here. These are Rock Islanders, Moliners, East Moliners. Some Iowa folks that are just all getting dumped into that system at a much more rapid pace than ever before,” Adamson said.
Nearly all homeless people are in that situation because they can’t afford housing, she noted.
“And even in some cases, like now we're seeing people who might have been doubled up. So like, I wasn't sleeping on the streets per se, my uncle was letting me live with them, but now we have all these other systemic issues happening. Like people are rapidly getting their assistance cut, and that food assistance might have been what that uncle was accepting as your payment to be able to stay there. And so now you don't have that anymore, and now you can't be doubled up anymore, and now you've entered the system.
“It’s incredibly difficult to find quality rentals that are within any amount of an affordable range,” she said, noting 20 years ago, her first efficiency apartment was $375 a month. “You would be lucky to find an efficiency on the market for $750 now.”
The Third Place is more than a drop-in center, where homeless people can find warmth, coffee, clothes and a bus token. They also find each other, Adamson said.
“We’re for people who are unhoused, but we are also here so that people can find each other, can build community with each other, in part because it'll help them stay housed once they get back to that point,” she said.
Before they opened, the only similar drop-in center in the area – separate and distinct from a homeless shelter -- was (and is) The Center, 1411 Brady St., Davenport.
“They provide similar services to what we provide here, but not exactly the same. We are the only service like that on this side of the river, for sure,” Adamson said.
“We have created a community here. We're a little family here at the Third Place, and we're always welcoming new people into that family,” she said of volunteers and unhoused guests who help run things. “But part of being in that family, as dysfunctional as it might be some days, is agreeing to pitch in and help.”
Recently, a beloved guest had passed away, who was in a nursing home after being homeless for a long time.
“She had been part of our community here for almost the whole last year we were open. And Cloey and I had spent time with her in the hospital, helped facilitate getting her to the nursing home, and had spent some time with her there, but she passed pretty rapidly,” Adamson said.
That morning, she found garbage strewn out back by their dumpster.
“I sighed and I was like, after all this today, I'm tired. I'm sad and now I need to go out here and pick up garbage,” she recalled. “And I opened up the back door and one of our guests, at the same time he must have seen it, he was already out there picking up all of the garbage for me. And it was, like I said, it was a difficult morning.
“I immediately just burst into tears because I was so humbled and grateful that people who, who we don't ask of that of them, who have nothing, who fight for not just like daily survival, but to feel like a human every day, who are people who most people pass on the sidewalk and won't even say hello or look them in the eye, was out there doing that for me,” Adamson said.
“Because they knew that that mattered. And so we really could not do what we do without the sort of mutual aid that we have going on here every day. We're really fortunate for that.”
She also counted their blessings in July, a day after their building was vandalized (as The Center in Davenport has been twice this year).
“After the heartbreak of having our building vandalized, it would have been easy to focus on the damage. But instead, we were reminded of something so much bigger,” The Third Place posted on Facebook July 17, 2026. “Throughout the day, so many of our guests stopped by just to check on us. They asked if we were okay, offered to help however they could, and reminded us that The Third Place isn’t just a building: it’s a community.
“We are incredibly thankful for every person who walks through our doors. Every day, more than 100 guests choose to spend part of their day with us, and together we’ve built something truly special: a place where people look out for one another, celebrate each other’s victories, and show up during the hard times. “To our amazing community: thank you. Your kindness, compassion, and willingness to care for each other is what makes The Third Place what it is. We are so proud and grateful to be on this journey with all of you.”
Need for financial help
The biggest need for The Third Place is monetary donations, especially with plans to move to the larger space.
“That will be more costly, obviously, than this wonderful tiny hole in the wall we're in now. And so any amount of financial contribution means a lot to a place like us,” Adamson said.
“We really rely on local funding and local donors to support our mission rather than— because that's how we can do the things we can do here that are different,” she said, noting pets are allowed in the center. “And not only have your pet, but we make sure that your pet's taken care of. We can't do that with a federal program or a state program.”
The Third Place also needs donations of men’s clothing, including:
- Men’s jeans — sizes 30–34
- Men’s shoes — sizes 10–12
- New men’s underwear
- Sweatpants and hoodies
The Third Place also is worried because of colder weather places more strain on homeless people.
“Winter is coming rapidly. This week has been horrible on our guests because every single morning they've shown up, pretty much it's been pouring down rain,” Adamson said Friday. “Their tents are soaked, their sleeping bags are soaked. Their clothes are soaked, everything is soaked. So survival gear like tents and sleeping bags and blankets are a big need right now.”
The QC also doesn’t have enough shelter beds for the number of people who are unhoused.
“And right as of right now, there's also no public plan for a winter emergency shelter, which will be the first time in my career that we haven't had one,” she said, noting Project NOW is working on that issue, which last year was addressed by a temporary winter shelter in Moline.
“For us here at the Third Place, we want to be transparent with our guests, and so we are telling people to not rely on the possibility that there might be one,” Adamson said. “If you can get into a shelter now, you need to. If we can help you navigate the relationship with your friend or your uncle or your cousin to be able to live with them here for a temporary period, we'll do that, because we're a little concerned that we might have a lot of people living outdoors in the middle of winter this year.”
Rock Island controversial social-services ordinance was adopted last fall, and there was a previous moratorium on new social-service providers like The Third Place. They got an exception to open and were grandfathered in after the law was adopted, which has minimum distance requirements to schools, parks, other similar services, and other restrictions, like fencing.
“We really raged against them. They're horribly discriminatory. They do nothing,” Adamson said Friday of such ordinances. “The most important thing I always want people to know about these ordinances is that they do nothing. In fact, do the opposite, probably harm folks. To eradicate homelessness, to end homelessness, to help people get housing, the ordinances affect nothing.
“What the ordinances affect are public perception of unhoused folks. So there's a desire to not have services concentrated in downtown Rock Island,” she said. “We wanted to open in downtown Rock Island because this is where the homeless people are, and they are in any community.”
“Rock Island is not unique in its challenges dealing with the unhoused community. And there are challenges,” Adamson said. “We know that sometimes people who are unhoused have to engage in things in a public setting that might deter people from wanting to go to a business that might be nearby, for example. But these ordinances will never change that unless we get to the point where we're just rounding people up and taking them to jail, camps or whatever.”
Not moving from Rock Island
“We've never seriously contemplated going to any other community. This is my community. Cloey lives in Moline, but this is my community. This is the poorest community in the Quad Cities,” she said of Rock Island.
“This is where the most number of people are going to end up unhoused, and this is where we want to be,” Adamson said, noting, they started looking for a bigger space about a week after first opening.
“We dreamed about the Abbey. I mean, I've driven past the Abbey 100 times a week,” she said of Abbey Station, which was built as a train passenger depot in 1901 and has been closed since COVID shutdowns in 2020. “It's so cool. I live in a historic home down here, so I love the history of Rock Island.”
The last passenger train left from Rock Island in 1978; the city bought the former depot (on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982) in 1994, and sold it in 1999 to Abbey Station LLC, for conversion to an upscale banquet hall by Joseph Lemon, who previously had converted a former abbey in Bettendorf (1401 Central Ave.) into the Abbey Hotel. Since 2008, that property has been the Abbey Addiction Treatment Center.
Christie and her husband Patrick Adamson live in a 160-year-old house in Rock Island. Abbey Station was for sale for $2.8 million (later reduced to $1.95 million), and leasing costs were exorbitant as well for Third Place, Adamson said. One of their board members had worked for Abbey Station owner Joe Lemon, and recommended looking there.
“Joe actually came here, met Cloey and I, our board, had a long lengthy conversation here,” Adamson said. “We were very transparent about our finances, only having been one year in operation. And about kind of our uniqueness and our mission here, our desire to not have a place that only homeless people went. We always wanted a place where you might not know if you walked in who was housed and unhoused, and that's the case here.
“There are people here every day who have a roof over their heads that are here because they need people and community, not because they get free coffee. They need people,” she said. “You need a place where they can reliably go every day where someone knows their name. And so, and Joe, of course, knew my father-in-law because everybody knows Jeff.”
“Joe renovated the Abbey because he wanted people to see it, because he wanted it to be used, and it just has not been used for the last eight years,” Adamson said of Abbey Station. “So he was ready to talk to us about what all the possibilities were. And so that's the process we're going through right now. We've applied for the social service license there, which required us to submit three waiver requests.”
Waivers needed for new use
Those waivers are to get exceptions for a six-foot-high fence, and for its proximity to Webber Park and Augustana College.
The Rock Island city manager is expected to decide on the waivers by mid-October.
The Third Place has two board members who are Augustana faculty, and they hope to strengthen their relationship with the private college, Adamson said.
“We've hosted a couple of Augie interns here. And so we reached out to Augustana,” she said. “We reached out to the neighbors that we were able to already, to start to develop those relationships with them. So we're kind of aware of what their opinions are.”
Adamson already has heard some public comment from those concerned Third Place guests may destroy Abbey Station.
“Joe believes in that same concept that we do, that why do we always think that the people who have the least continue to deserve the least?” she asked. “Why can't they have their cup of coffee and get the support that they need and the resources they need in a beautiful setting? Why does that offend you? That has more to say about you than it does about us wanting to do that for people.”
The Third Place is negotiating a reasonable lease with Lemon, and has let their guests know the plans.
“Our guests' opinions and input is at the top of our concern list. And so we spent a lot of time asking them questions, hypotheticals,” Adamson said. “If we're in this part of Rock Island, would you come? Would you be able to get there? Would you still be able, would it still be as valuable of a resource to you? If it was a 15-minute walk from here, would you come? Which is how far the Abbey is. We've walked it several times.”
“Could we have found a place within downtown Rock Island that would have suited our needs in terms of just that component of accessibility better? Yes. But the city would have never approved I,” she said. “They don't want any more social service agencies that serve the unhoused population in the Downtown Alliance's area, the special service area.”
“Are there hundreds of vacant properties down here that, all could have been potentials that might have been easier to access?” Adamson said of downtown.
“They weren't really available to us, not without like potential litigation, because they would have all been denied,” she said. “And that was very clear that, that they would not have approved us moving to, whatever, the Argus building, the old Project NOW admin building, for example.”
If they can move to Abbey Station, The Third Place plans to give out many more bus tokens, given it is on Metro’s bus route, and they plan to ask Metro if they can have a bus actually pick up and drop people off at Abbey Station.
“There is a public sidewalk all the way from here to there. How well the public sidewalk is going— is maintained, we'll have to cross that bridge when we get to it this winter,” Adamson said.
Win-win for Abbey owner
Lemon is thrilled with the new arrangement for Abbey Station, which while not purchased by Third Place, will be turned over to them to use.
“It's just been kind of tough sledding in the hospitality field in the aftermath of COVID, and we do work across five different time zones as a family,” he said Sunday, Oct. 4. “We’re spread pretty thin as it is, and our principal focus is on various charitable work that we do. So we have the Abbey Addiction Treatment Center in Bettendorf, and that's our principal focus. We have about 30 employees there, and we've treated thousands of people over the last 18 years there.”
Lemon owns several office buildings in the QC, including for state and nonprofit agencies. The Abbey Center in Bettendorf is a residential treatment facility that serves 300 people a year. Abbey Station went up for sale about two years ago.
He knows Lindsay Henry, from The Third Place board, who’s worked at social service agencies, including at the Abbey in Bettendorf.
“I’ve known her for over a decade, and she contacted me and said, hey, I'm part of this exciting group and we're looking for a new location,” Lemon said. “It struck me as kind of an obvious synergy between what our goal is with Abbey Station and what their goal is in serving the community. We're really pretty aligned in that.”
“I really like their mission. This is a noble mission. The people whom they serve deserve to be in a nice, beautiful, safe, attractive place,” he said of Third Place. “There's a second part which was very compelling to me, which is this leadership team is excellent. Led principally by Christie Adamson and Cloey Miller on a day-to-day basis, but their entire board is just— they're all whip-smart, sharp, and really, really committed.”
“In my negotiations with their team, I can affirmatively say without any question, these people are excellent. And if they wanted to start a tractor company, they could do that, and in 12 months they'd be competing with John Deere,” Lemon said.
“They are just sharp. So I have no hesitation about the success of their mission, and that gives me a lot of confidence in wanting to support them.”
He plans to use lease payments from The Third Place, to help support his business nonprofit missions, in serving people in need, through The Abbey Foundation.
“It's been a really heartwarming thing to combine your career with community service,” Lemon said. “We're hopeful not only will that reinforce our own mission of what we're doing in Bettendorf, but we're hopeful that it helps encourage the support for The Third Place because you kind of get to double down on your community investment.”
He also supports The Third Place making the building available for public and private events on nights and weekends, to further support their mission.
“I’m not looking to make any profit on this whatsoever because whatever rent they pay would go right back into the Abbey Foundation. That helps our clients and mission in Iowa,” Lemon said. “If they happen to be successful in fundraising and/or these events, good for them. You know, then they can expand the scope of their services. They're ambitious and they want to help as many people as possible in as many different ways as possible.”
Abbey Station is very personal for him and his family, since his father (a Rock Island native) used to take the train from there to South Bend, Ind., to and from University of Notre Dame, from which he graduated in 1966.
Lemon said it’s doable for The Third Place to open there by Dec. 1, 2026.
“If they want to be operational by December 1st, as I say, we're in the middle of finalizing our agreement, but they could be in there by Friday as far as I'm concerned,” he said.
“In days of good weather, it's certainly walkable and probably not a bad idea for people to be out walking,” Lemon said of its distance to downtown Rock Island. “Then we're right on the bus line and I think it's good. It's good for those folks to have experience using public transportation because that really opens the world to them. In time, they may develop their own shuttling system or something, but I don't want to get ahead of where we are today, but they'll figure that out. But in the meantime, that's what MetroLINK is for.”
Improving partnership with Augustana
Adamson is excited about improving their partnership with Augie, from which she graduated in 2009.
“I'm in homeless services because my advisor at Augustana—I was a transfer student. I was towards the tail end of getting my sociology degree. And to be quite frank, I had not done anything in the community,” she said. “Hadn't really volunteered anywhere, hadn't really done many internships. And my advisor, I can still remember the conversation, was like, you kind of got to do something here if you want to, A, figure out what you want to do when you're done, also have something other than working at Harris Pizza on your resume.”
“And I started volunteering at Humility, Patrick and I did actually— doing laundry,” she recalled. “I didn't know anything about homeless services. I eventually graduated, worked at Family Resources briefly, and then went back to Humility and that's kind of how my career started.”
Her first community involvement “fundamentally changed probably the course of my career,” Adamson said. “Our short-term goal is to just replicate the services that we're providing here there. Winter's coming, it's cold, we're serving too many people here comfortably. We need more dignity, more space to spread out.
“Long-term, or medium-term I guess you could say, is The Abbey's beautiful, and it's still going to be set up like an event center,” she said, noting The Third Place will use it as much as they can, but still have it available as an event center on the weekends and weeknights.
“We've already had some folks inquire about, oh, could I have my holiday Christmas party there?” Adamson said. And those proceeds could help support The Third Place.
The move would greatly expand The Third Place’s space – from about 2,500 square feet now, to 6,037 square feet.
“It also has a full commercial kitchen, which we will not be utilizing when we first move in, because we need some time to get resettled with what we're doing here, but we'll be utilizing in some way down the road,” Adamson said. But with the new room, they would not add overnight shelter services, she noted.
“Nothing solves homelessness except for housing. And we've been saying that for 20 years and homelessness has only increased,” Adamson said. “We can't only focus our efforts on the development of getting more housing online. We have to do that while we also acknowledge that the number of people entering the system means that we don't ever have enough shelter beds or services to immediately address that crisis.
“And so we have people just languishing within the homeless service system. We have an obligation to them in those moments of their lives to try to reduce that,” she said. “Reduce as much of that harm as we possibly can. And that's what we're trying to do here. If there was enough job opportunity and enough mental health services and a magic bullet for everybody who walked in our doors, Cloey and I would gladly go back to what we thought was going to be 40 people a week. But that doesn't exist, and it's not going to. Probably not in my lifetime.”
Creating more affordable housing
Adamson admires the number of QC organizations working tirelessly to improve the amount of affordable housing stock.
“The number of units that we're lacking is overwhelming,” she said. “There are a lot of amazing housing projects that have come online with partnerships between different social service organizations, housing organizations. When you're here every day and you announce a new— let's say somebody announces a new housing project, and in five years, or maybe two years from now, and you look at just maybe the room full of 30 people we have here, and you know that in all likelihood maybe two of them would get that.”
“We have to provide people with more than we are now while they're experiencing the current crisis they're in,” Adamson said, noting there have been very hurtful cuts in federal Medicaid and food assistance programs.
“It's one of these examples where, you know, 1+1= 3,” Lemon said of their move, to bring a historic, beautiful and vacant property back to productive use. “It’s like, their mission, our mission -- this place is underutilized. They're going to maximize the utility of it. It's going to help our other mission elsewhere.
“They're going to help hundreds of people in the community.
And they have a waitlist of volunteers,” he added. “You know, people believe in this leadership team and they want to help. And so I think, there's just going to be a lot of synergy in the community.”
For more information and to donate to The Third Place, visit its Facebook page HERE and website HERE.
This story was produced by WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. We rely on financial support from our listeners and readers to provide coverage of the issues that matter to the Quad Cities region and beyond. As someone who values the content created by WVIK's news department, please consider making a financial contribution to support our work.
