For consideration: Family Promise

Dear “SACSON” friends,

I’m excited about something…
I just met someone from Jacksonville who is working through  her church in a ministry called “Family Promise.” This is acustomer of mine who works in medical diagnostics for a \physician up there.
Family Promise partners with 17 churches in the area and these take turns to temporarily house up to 7 homeless families with up to 28 total people at any given time.The churches take turns to have these folks stay in their Sunday School rooms or other facilities for a week at a time.
They have a van for transporting families. They have a couple of people and a small office where they process intake applications and qualify the people. No drug addicts are allowednor anyone with serious mental illness.  The participants are not allowed to drink alcohol while in the program.
One volunteer spends the night a ta the facility each night.It is not a heavy burden on each church because they only need to do this week once every 17 weeks.
The participants are given a cooked breakfast, packed lunches and then a warm dinner each day, all prepared by volunteers.
These people have EXPERIENCE.  If we wanted to implement a similar ministry in Seminole County we would learn from their experience and they have some helpful informationand materials available for us.
It’s not just happening in Jacksonville but in other areas too.
I would really like for us to consider looking into this.It seems to have the means to get us where we are trying to go without repeating everything they have already done to learn the hard way.
We can still incorporate our ideas about lockers, ID help,laundry facilities etc.
MANY of these families end up working, and having a home.When they get to that part of the process, the churches will often “POUND” them.  This was something I had never heard about!The pastors encourage their congregants to bring a POUND of something to  a special service announced ahead of time.  A pound of flour, a pound of diapers etc. etc.They have found that church members can be very generous when it comes to furniture and dishes they no longer need etc.
So it is fairly common for them to help these homeless families establish a new home after a few months of aid, and then move on to the next needy family on the waiting list.
Interesting concept, eh?
If multiple organizations including churches in our area are willing to participate like they have with Grace and Grits for example, this could be a tremendous boost and at the same time accomplish MANY of our goals at SACSON.
I was VERY impressed with all of this, as my customer describedhow joyful it was for the church members to engage in this ministry…Take a look and let me know what you think…
May the Kingdon of God be expanded in our midst!

Bry Carling

http://www.familypromisejax.org/