Requesting financial support for an emergency shelter for homeless families.

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.