Moscow and the surrounding area offer one emergency housing option for homeless residents — and it is usually full.
Steve Bonnar, director of Sojourner’s Alliance, said it has been running at full capacity for three years, housing up to 23 people at a time and turning away between seven and 15 families a week.
But after the poverty forum met last year, a new option is in the works.
Family Promise is a national organization that provides temporary emergency housing specifically for people with children using churches as the basis for services.
Bruce Pitman, University of Idaho dean of students, organizes the local branch.
“As the poverty forum started to organize themselves they chose to self-indentify with certain issues,” Pitman said. “Some chose to work on hunger, some issues of mental health others on unemployment. I was drawn to issues of homelessness in Moscow. The more I learned about the needs in the community, the more motivated I was to be involved.”
Pitman said he knew about the Family Promise program from his daughter, who works with a chapter in Bozeman, Mont. He said his involvement in this program is a volunteer commitment of his own, unrelated to his work at the university.
Family Promise is still in the planning stages, but Bonnar said a number of churches have committed to the program. He said about 12 churches need to commit in order for the program to be effective.
“A number of churches in Moscow and Pullman in the community have committed to being a partner congregation — a partner congregation providing volunteers, food and support,” Pitman said. “We are also seeking congregations to be host churches, meaning they will offer services to provide an overnight shelter.”
The program is designed so that families spend each week at a different church where they can sleep, eat and access the Internet and other services.
Pitman said although the planning is moving forward, it is at a slow pace.
“It’s a slow process because we know each church has their own decision making systems and their own outreach and mission projects,” Pitman said. “So they are evaluating how Family Promise would fit in.”
He said it’s slow, but it needs to be.
The organization is also waiting on funding to start the program.
“The typical Family Promise program runs on about $100,000 to $120,000 a year and we need at least half of that in the bank and committed before we ever hire our first employee and make any commitments,” Pitman said.
Bonnar said the organization has received grants from the Giving Circle and Avista for $5,000 and $15,000 respectively.
He also said Sojourner’s Alliance will potentially be a site.
“We have a large basement so a church without space could use it,” Bonnar said. “We would only host families four times a year. We still have to do some preliminary legwork.”
Once operating, Pitman said the program could help about 12 or 13 people at any one time.
“So at any given time might be 2, 3, 4 families given the composition,” Pitman said. “We will be serving a lot of single parent families maybe with 3 children. The emphasis is on helping families with children. It’s not designed to support single adult individuals.”
Pitman said the national average is about 55 to 65 days from the time the family qualifies to be in Family Promise and that it takes about that long for them to be functioning as an individual.
Pitman said he hopes the program will be operational by next year.
“January ‘13 or February ‘13 our program would provide services to families but that is depending on a lot of different variables,” Pitman said.
Katy Sword can be reached at [email protected]