Dear friends,
November is Homelessness Awareness Month. As I write this, our Outreach team is working alongside 250+ neighbors experiencing homelessness here in our community - each individual with their own unique story, challenges, and dreams for the future. Neighbors like Denise, who work diligently through each step required to secure housing, but find their momentum halted when there aren’t enough affordable homes for the people who need them. The journey towards stability is all the more difficult, and feels even more hopeless, when there aren’t homes to find at the end of the road.
Every day, our Outreach team works to provide critical resources - food, clothing, showers, and more - while partnering to pursue long term stability. Every day, our team celebrates stories of hope, and small wins, while walking with our neighbors through incredibly difficult trials. This year, we’ve celebrated 80 homeless-to-housed success stories so far; each one the culmination of a remarkable journey that we’re honored to be a part of.
Our mission has long been “...to help individuals and families by providing food, clothing, and shelter, and the opportunity to develop skills that will help them live a stable and prosperous life.” Since our earliest days, we’ve assisted neighbors in securing safe, affordable housing because we know it’s vital to a family’s ability to thrive. In Ottawa County, a recent study found that our rental housing vacancy rate is 1%, while a healthy market has a rate of about 5-6%. Housing is scarce and costs continue to rise. Families teetering on the edge of a crisis struggle to hold it all together, and neighbors who are unhoused face a series of hurdles that make regaining stability feel almost impossible.
Addressing this growing crisis will take all of us working creatively together. Last year we shared about our plans, in partnership with Dwelling Place, to add 52 mixed-income affordable rental homes in our community. Groundbreaking is anticipated in late spring 2025, and we’re thrilled to see progress - but we know that for people struggling with housing, right now, long term solutions don’t meet immediate needs. This month, we invite you to read stories, learn about housing insecurity in our own community, and help meet urgent needs while our team works one-on-one with guests to build toward a brighter future. As the weather turns colder, you can support our unhoused neighbors by:
Everyone deserves a safe home. Everyone deserves good food. Everyone deserves the opportunity to build a strong foundation for their family. And everyone needs a community that believes in them - their worth, their dignity, and their potential. Thank you for working alongside us to build a community where this vision becomes a reality.
Sincerely,
Scott Rumpsa | Chief Executive Officer
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