Requesting financial support for an emergency shelter for homeless families. https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/proposals-2015/requesting-financial-support-for-an-emergency-shelter-for-homeless-families https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/@@site-logo/sitelogo-75x75.png

Requesting financial support for an emergency shelter for homeless families.

Additional Information
Used for	We are looking to expand our ability as an organization to support the mental health needs of the homeless population we serve. This money will be used to pay for training for staff in how to deal with mental health needs, it will be used to create a program that will focus on connecting our homeless guests with the mental health professionals in the community, and it will be used to help create informational brochures and presentations to inform the public about the mental health needs of the homeless population in emergency shelters.
Benefits	There are many individuals and groups that want to help homeless individuals but when untrained staff and volunteers experience someone that suffers from anxiety, depression, ADHD, bipolar, and schizophrenia often they are not able to understand and interact appropriately with these conditions. Mental illness is on the rise and yet education for the volunteer and for staff that are not social workers is not. The goal of this request is to begin to help train staff and volunteers in how to effectively work with those individuals and how to get them to the help they may need.
Proposal Description	Family Promise of Skagit Valley is an emergency shelter in Sedro-Woolley, WA that is focused on helping the 1,000 homeless children and the families in Skagit Valley. We help them by providing food, shelter, counseling services while they are looking for permanent shelter, jobs, and resources so that they can get back up on their feet. We are one of 192 networks in the U.S. and this approach is proving to be an efficient and effective use of existing resources and volunteers. Since we opened we have found that almost 90% of the homeless population we serve has some form of a mental health condition. We want to continue to get better at serving this large chunk of the homeless population. This grant would allow the director and case manager to attend relevant conventions and training's in order to expand our knowledge of mental health conditions and for us to be able to serve this population more effectively. From this training we will develop training opportunities for our 800 volunteers to help expand their knowledge of how to effectively work with families with mental health needs. We would also offer these opportunities to the community. This grant would allow us to expand our case manager hours from 24 to 30 in order to spend more time with our guests in order to accommodate the expanded needs that these individuals often have. The expanded hours would allow for additional networking time that we are in need of for our case manager to network with individuals from the mental health community. We believe the result of the grant will be that we will be able to successfully place more families that have mental health needs in permanent homes and to help them to stay in those homes for the long term. This will also help bring more stability to the children of parents with mental health needs resulting in better attendance at school and a better outlook on life.