Community of Hope’s goal is to end homelessness for the families we serve by providing prevention strategies to help keep them from becoming homeless, short-term housing and assistance during times of crisis, and permanent housing with supportive services.

Supportive services include family case management, housing search and support, employment search and job training referrals, connections to benefits, activities for children and youth, mentoring, life skills, and parenting classes.

Girard Street Family Shelter provides apartment-style temporary shelter for 20 homeless families with children at a time. We served 49 families in 2010. Supportive services focus on helping families move quickly out of homelessness to stable housing, and include referrals to job training and mental health and substance abuse treatment. On-site life skills classes teach parenting, budgeting, and other useful skills. A family case management model assures that the needs of both parents and children are addressed.

Hope Apartments provides apartment-style transitional housing for 10 homeless families with children where the head of household is in recovery from substance abuse. Adults attend outpatient substance abuse treatment while simultaneously working on employment issues and housing needs such as credit repair and permanent housing search. We served 19 families in 2010. Supportive services focus on stabilizing recovery so that families can move out of homelessness. Staff includes a Youth Advocate who focuses specifically on the needs of resident children.

Home Now provides scattered-site permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless families with children, with a focus on a chronically homeless, hard-to-place population. We served 113 families in 2010.  We help families maintain housing, increase income, and become stronger by addressing areas such as mental and physical health, parenting, and children’s education.

Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program(HPRP) was launched in December 2009 with funding from the DC Department of Housing and Community Development, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The program provides short-term rental and utility assistance along with case management to those individuals and families who are at imminent risk of being homeless or are already homeless and need assistance to obtain housing. In 2010, we provided 56 families with prevention assistance. Our rapid re-housing program is currently working with 52 families. Families who are being re-housed also receive case management support for 3 to 18 months.