February 8, 2010

Homeless families in need of shelter and stability find help in the Families Building Community program at Heartland Alliance. For over 18 years, case managers and staff have helped hundreds of homeless families reach self-sufficiency by providing housing, employment services, and intensive in-home case management.

Homeless parents with children find their way to the Families Building Community program through referrals from shelters and emergency housing facilities. The demand for the program is great, and a waitlist is always active. Working with their case manager, families develop their own goals for housing, employment, and self-sufficiency.

Many of the homeless families in the program are led by a single mother. The group is diverse and some families are led by a single father or a grandparent or two single siblings. As the families and the case managers get to know each other, some of the families confide they are domestic violence survivors. In the last couple of years, more and more of the homeless families in the program have been affected by the recession, pushed into homelessness by circumstances outside of their control.

For 12 months, families and case managers work together to find safe, affordable housing, to write a resume and learn interviewing skills, to access counseling when needed, and to move the family toward success and self-sufficiency. After that first year of intensive in-home case management, the staff of the Families Building Community programs follow up with the families to ensure the families are maintaining a stable environment.

Thanks to the success of the Families Building Community program and its unique intensive in-home approach to helping families, new programs are being developed by Heartland Alliance under the same model for other groups of families and people in need.

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