Salem Interfaith Hospitality Network-working to end family homelessness
Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11:28
For the last four years, I have been volunteering with Salem Interfaith Hospitality Network. We give homeless families, very much like the one shown here, a safe place to sleep at night in area churches and the support they need to get housing.
What do I do? I sleep (I am really good at that.) :-) More specifically, I am one of the volunteers that spends the night at our church when we are hosting the families in the program. It seems like a small contribution but every little bit helps, right?
When we think of the homeless, we think of drug addicts and the mentally ill, right? We don't think of the family that moved here because the dad thought he had a job lined up only to find that it had evaporated.Or the woman with three teenage children that works as a flagger for a road construction company that got behind in her bills, or the construction worker that got injured on the job and has been off work for six months.. These are people who have been barely scraping by and all it takes is the loss of a job, a major bill, or the breakup of a relationship to make the difference between being able to pay rent or sleeping in their car.
Up until now, Salem Interfaith has been providing overnight housing, meals, a day shelter, and help finding housing to families accepted into the program. Now they are launching a program called "Family Promise". They are working to put as many tools as they can in each family's toobox. Tools that help them build their resources so they will never face homelessness again:
- Financial Literacy - For many homeless families, their difficulty with budgeting was a significant contributing factor leading to their homelessness. Classes and meeting with a financial counselor to be sure they are on track and living within their means.
- Work - Volunteers will work together to assess and address barriers to employment, provide individualized job search support, and teach job retention skills.
- Parenting - classes and support groups will cover topics such as : self-care, stress and anger management, communication skills and positive approaches to discipline.
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