Home will offer haven to families

by Brandon Macz (7/6/08)
Reprinted with permission from the Lewiston Tribune

Family Promise of Lewis-Clark Valley will open its day center Aug. 3, offering assistance to families in crisis and opportunities to improve lives across the valley.

Family Promise is a national interfaith hospitality network that has been providing food, shelter and opportunities for struggling families for more than 20 years.

The day center in Lewiston is a project started more than three years ago at the First Church of the Nazarene's Edge Center and involves members from several churches.

Ron Ramos, director of the day center, said the valley has more need for this facility than is apparent.

"It's a hidden population in the sense where some of them have been relocating back to the Northwest," he said. "They're hidden from the public eye, but they're there."

Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church owns the home at 921 Ninth Ave., Lewiston, which will serve as the new day center, and is one of Family Promise's host and support congregations.

Conditions to become an affiliate of Family Promise, said board member Toni Kraut, is to raise a third of the necessary budget to operate and to find churches that will help support the program.

"There are several independent churches that are either host churches or team churches," Ramos said.

Family Promise has raised more than $77,000 and found 17 churches to act as hosts and supporters.

Host churches will provide space for families to sleep overnight and then will be transported back to the day center in the morning, while team churches will provide meals.

"Even though there are many churches involved, we're one foundation, and the purpose is to help people," said Sharon Hoseley, a member of the Family Promise grant committee.

Families in need will use the day center as an address for receiving mail, a shower facility and network for assisting in finding permanent jobs and transitional housing.

"My main role is going to be more social work with them," Ramos said.

Family Promise is meant to be a temporary shelter for families, Kraut said, and does not accept people who are battling drug or alcohol addiction, or those with mental illnesses.

"They have a certain criteria that they have to meet," she said. "They actually are counseled. They have to help themselves in order to stay in the program."

Family Promise organizers will receive referrals from social service agencies in the area when they come closer to opening the center, but are currently not accepting early applicants.

Carolyn Jones, vice president of the board of trustees for Family Promise of Lewis-Clark Valley, said community support was pivotal to funding their efforts.

"We've had a number of businesses in town (that) have been very gracious in their donations to us," she said. "We're solely supported by donations and pledges."

Family Promise has received several grants to support its new day center, including a $39,000 block grant from the city of Lewiston to purchase and provide maintenance for a van that will taxi families between the center and supporting churches.

"When the ball starts whirling, people start getting in line," said Hoseley, a retired school teacher. "Having seen kids go homeless halfway through the year ... all of a sudden all school work would cease."

According to Family Promise's national 2007 program service report, 60 percent of those assisted are children - 46 percent of those under the age of 5.

Kraut said that 80 percent of families find permanent housing through Family Promise nationwide.

The day center is nearly complete after a volunteer work session June 27, which depended on people to paint and fix up the interior of the house.

"We had so much help that it went really fast," Jones said of the nearly 100 volunteers who filtered in and out, not including contractors and inspectors, "to help us get a guide for the phases we're going to need for all the updating and fixing we'll need."

There will be an open house for the new center July 26, the only day it will be open to the general public.

Family Promise will host its Cardboard Box City Sept. 26. This is a fundraiser where participants provide their own cardboard boxes as temporary dwellings to sleep in overnight, while collecting pledges in the afternoon.