Who We Are
Our mission is ending homelessness...one family at a time. We do that by helping homeless and low-income families achieve sustainable independence.
In 2012, eight members of the Genesee County community came together with the hope of doing something about family homelessness. ​ They all felt that it was a complicated problem, one that you might not always notice, it was certainly more than the person you might run into outside of a store, or on a city street or an exit ramp of the expressway. It is a complicated problem, one not easily resolved, and needed a complex solution.
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For many of them, the face of homelessness looks like your favorite cashier at your local grocery store or that guy that always chats with you at the gas station. It might even be the cook or your favorite wait staff at your local diner. These families, not wanting to tell anyone out of fear, sleep in cars, motels, or doubled up with others. They worry about their safety, nightly, and where their next meal will come from, or worse will they soon overstay their “welcome”.
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This group found that another organization had already been working on this problem since 1986. Instead of raising millions of dollars, building (or finding ) a building, and hiring staff to cover twenty-four hours a day/seven days a week, they learned that they could become an affiliate, and Family Promise would help get their community involved and using existing resources to accomplish their goal.
Instead of building big, fancy buildings, they turned rooms in area churches/houses of worship into bedrooms and used volunteers to provide meals, overnight stays, and transportation. Family Promise of Genesee County is funded entirely through community and judicatory grants and fundraisers. The Family Promise model operates at about 1/3 of the cost of a traditional shelter because churches/houses of worship volunteer to provide the physical shelter at night; additionally, they meet the food needs of our families. Roughly 90% of our budget is directly connected to programming.
Today, we have touched the lives of more than 984 families and 2,456 children in Genesee County.