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June 24, 2008

Family Promise to help area homeless

By Charles Oliver

Some 1,704 people in Whitfield County are homeless or “precariously housed,” according to a count performed by the Dalton-Whitfield Community Development Corp. earlier this year.

Now, a group of area churches have signed up to take part in a national program called Family Promise that could provide shelter and other services for some homeless families.

“Specifically, this is for families with children that are homeless,” said Claas Ehlers, a Family Promise national director.

“The program takes a maximum 14 people. That’s usually three or four families,” Ehlers said. “They stay at accommodations for a week at a time,” he said.

The families will change location each week.

“The families are screened coming in, so it’s only families that are appropriate for a volunteer environment,” Ehlers said. “If there are substance abuse problems, or there is a domestic violence situation, that is not a family that we would serve,”

Ehlers said that, on average, a family stays with the program 56 days.

The key, he says, is that the program doesn’t merely provide shelter but also fellowship and help overcoming the problems that led the family to become homeless.

“We don’t want the family leaving the program until they can sustain their independence,” he said.

The program is active in more than 129 communities across the country.

“And we have 140 networks. For instance, Chattanooga runs two networks, so you have two groups of 13 churches hosting,” he said.

The program began in New Jersey in 1986 and went national in 1988.

John and Kay Peabody are co-presidents of Family Promise of Whitfield County. They’ve currently got eight churches that have volunteered to take part in the program: Varnell United Methodist Church, Evangelical Methodist Church, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Bethel AME Church, Rock Bridge Community Church, Tunnel Hill United Methodist Church, Mount Vernon United Methodist Church and Iglesia Bautista Nueva Vida.

“The first organizational meeting was May 2007,” said Kay Peabody.

She says the group hopes to start operating by the beginning of 2009. But the program calls for 13 churches in each network, so they are still looking for additional churches.

Churches that wish to participate should call John or Kay Peabody at (706) 852-9896 or send an e-mail to jnpeabody@hotmail.com.

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