With a donation from Concord Holiday Inn’s new owner, Harbor Care gets furniture for their housing programs

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey.

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey. Catherine McLaughlin—Monitor staff

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey.

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey. Catherine McLaughlin / Monitor staff

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey.

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey. Catherine McLaughlin—Monitor staff

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey.

Volunteers and employees from Novel Iron Works move furniture out of the downtown Holiday Inn that is being donated to Harbor Care of Nashua, which helps veterans and the homeless. The hotel is being renovated by developer Steve Duprey. Catherine McLaughlin—Monitor staff

By MICHAELA TOWFIGHI

Monitor staff

Published: 01-04-2025 3:01 PM

Modified: 01-06-2025 12:01 PM


Inside the old Holiday Inn in downtown Concord, hundreds of recently empty hotel rooms are filled with a laundry list of furniture – bed frames, mattresses, desks, chairs, lamps, sheets, pillows.

Developer Steve Duprey, who is renovating the hotel into a Hilton DoubleTree, decided to put the excess furniture to use with a donation to Harbor Care, a nonprofit that helps house veterans and people experiencing homelessness across New Hampshire.

“Anything they wanted they could have,” said Duprey, who closed the hotel in December with plans to reopen later this year. “They took lamps. They took all the desks. They took all the desk chairs. They took bureaus, mirrors.”

Duprey had been holding onto a request from David Tille, director of community engagement and government relations for Harbor Care – if he ever had excess furniture, the nonprofit could put it to use. Outfitting the organization’s transitional and permanent housing programs, as well as their community residences for people experiencing homelessness, was always a challenge, Tille shared.

Not only does Harbor Care now have a stockpile of furniture for their programs, but the donation also sparked a new idea for Tille and Duprey – creating a nonprofit organization that helps coordinate similar efforts.

When a hotel sells, the new owner often has two options: hire a liquidator to dispose of the furniture or donate the items. Industry franchises like Hiltons and Holiday Inns have different standards, from thread counts in sheets to brand standards, which means that the furniture isn’t viable under a new chain, said Duprey.

Duprey chose the donation route – as long as Harbor Care volunteers could collect the furniture, anything in the vacant rooms was theirs – but he knows that many new owners don’t go that route. A nonprofit would work to receive large-scale furniture donations like this, and then redistribute them to homeless shelters and other housing initiatives.

“I think there’d be a lot of hotel owners who would find it not only as valuable as giving it to a liquidator in terms of a dollar value but it also does a good thing,” he said. “I think we’d find a very lucrative base of donors that could help out.”

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The furniture will immediately help outfit Harbor Care’s four veterans properties, with two locations in Nashua, one in Manchester and one in Plymouth, as well as the Cynthia Day Family Center, a residential rehabilitation facility for pregnant and parenting women and their children. The rest will be stored in a warehouse until needed.

With the donation, Duprey hopes to see an expansion of their services in Concord as ending veteran homelessness has been a concentrated effort at both the state and city level.

By 2026, the New Hampshire Department of Military Affairs and Veterans Services has been ordered to end veterans homelessness. In Concord, the city’s steering committee on homelessness has identified veterans as a target area to achieve “functional zero” – meaning homelessness is brief and temporary, if at all. Current estimates from street outreach workers indicate only a handful of veterans are unhoused in the Concord area.

In terms of hauling the furniture out of the hotel, it has been all hands on deck in the community, according to Duprey. The hotel officially closed on Dec. 15, with a metal fence now surrounding the property. After interior renovations, the hotel is slated to reopen in May.

“People have been stepping up all around the state who’ve been connected to Harbor Care or know of their good work,” said Duprey.