WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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New Hope for Families raised $3.9 million to help build a new homeless shelter and child care center.
About 40 percent of people experiencing homelessness in Monroe County are families with children, says the organization’s executive director, Emily Pike.
“Those people don’t tend to be very visible,” she said. “Those families are afraid of being separated from their children.”
Over the weekend, New Hope for Families celebrated its 10-year anniversary. In light of that milestone, Pike talked about the history of the organization and the work it does in the community.
“At that time, our community didn’t have a shelter for families,” she said. “What that meant was that families either had to separate in order to receive services, or in some cases surrender their children to foster care.”
Construction of the new campus at 1140 South Morton Street began in April and is expected to be completed in December of this year.
Pike says the new facility will increase emergency shelter capacity to a total of 12 families at a time.
“We leased five little houses on West Second Street for a dollar a year, and that was a game changer for us,” said Pike. “But the truth is, those little houses were never really designed for what we used them for.”
$85,000 of funding came from Early Learning Indiana, coordinated by Kelly Echard, a second-year graduate student at Indiana University’s O’Neil School for Public and Environmental Affairs, who studies nonprofit management and policy analysis.
Echard said her role came about through a course she took at IU. She said students chose a topic of interest and were assigned to help raise funds for a non-profit.
She said she is passionate about the issue of homelessness and that she was assigned to New Hope for Families.
“I ran into Early Learning Indiana, and they were looking to fund other child care facilities,” said Echard.
After learning about New Hope for Families’ expansion, Echard contacted Natalie Brake, the director of community outreach and engagement for Early Learning Indiana.
At first, the grant she looked into numbered in the lower thousands. After discovering New Hope’s efforts to expand access to high-quality early learning, Brake saw that the organization’s values matched those of Early Learning.
Through that partnership, Echard landed a higher amount in grant funding.
“I told her about this study of Monroe County where there were 81 homeless children in 2020, and how we’re looking to serve half of those children by providing shelter and subsidized child care,” she said.
Pike says the $85,000 grant will help fund early learning equipment and materials, including furnishings for offices and classrooms and supplies for a commercial kitchen.
However, she says there are several other partners to help provide a new shelter and child care center. She names just a few but says she’s almost certain she’s leaving somebody out.
The partners she listed include: the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County, Bloomington Township, Secretly Canadian, the Smithville Charitable Foundation, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis, the New Hope Board of Directors and the City of Bloomington.
She said about $1.6 million of New Hope’s funding comes from individual donations. To learn more, you can visit newhope4families.org.
