House Of Hope Corp.
Jean M. Olivier, Executive Director
P.O. Box 8698
65 Shippen Ave.
Warwick, R.I. 02888
(401) 463-3324
(401) 463-3574 fax

This is one of those happy stories about a small program, created to meet a specific need, that learned from its experiences and evolved into an innovative effort to help individuals regain their self-reliance.

Specifically, it was a group of six members of a Catholic church's community action group, early in the '80s, who became interested in the subject of homelessness when it seemed to be limited to California in New York, then watched with frustration as it came closer to home and finally appeared right in their own town. The church, with Warwick city government, started operating an emergency shelter one night a week in 1987, then quickly expanded to full weekend coverage and started finding other housing options -- including houses left vacant in the path of an airport-expansion project -- to provide temporary and transitional housing for homeless families.

That emergency-shelter operation continues to this day as Warwick Shelter Inc.; and in 1989, the initial group, including Jean Olivier, created another new initiative -- House of Hope -- a caring and effective transitional shelter for homeless families. They took over and rehabbed the old Spring Green School, an abandoned two-room schoolhouse in an affluent residential neighborhood of suburban Warwick, and turned it into two bright, stylish apartments as well as housing the organization's offices, food pantry, clothes closet and outreach ministry.

"None of the original founders had social-services experience," Olivier said. "Instead, we just, rather humbly, asked ourselves, 'If we needed shelter, what would WE hope to find?'" The answers to that question, along with advice from the community's short-term shelter operators, were, basically, "Make services easily available," and "Give people as much time as they need to recover."

This is labor-intensive work, with staff working one-on-one with the residents to identify their goals and work on whatever they need to do to achieve them. Residents pay 70 percent of their income (typically a $445 monthly welfare grant for a family of two) as rent and into a savings plan used to give them a stake for rent, deposit and other expenses associated with setting up housekeeping.

With only two families in the shelter at any one time (and they usually stay three to four months), the numbers aren't large, but a total of 47 families have been through the program since 1990, and most of them have stayed off the streets and are going on to complete their education.

Two years ago, House of Hope opened another two-unit house, this one open to families who've completed the residential program and may stay up to two years while they complete an educational goal. The staff also works on an outreach basis with dozens of other families in other area shelters

Although Warwick is a shady, relatively prosperous suburban community without real street homelessness, there's a surprising amount of poverty and family homelessness, typically related to abused and/or abandoned mothers and their children. House of Hope takes it on with a very lean $156,000 annual budget and a staff of five, just three of them full-time.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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