Welcome to St. John's Shelter Program

PLEASE NOTE -- All donations received between March 1, 2008 and April 30, 2008 will be matched by Alan Shawn Feinstein as part of the Foundation's 2008 Challenge to End Hunger. Click here to donate.

A Look Back at 2007 as We Charge Full-Steam Ahead

With your support in 2007, St. John’s was able to greatly augment its service to homeless women with Children in Sacramento County. Together, we achieved the following:

• We expanded from a 60-day to a 90-day Program! This change helps us better ensure the success of our clients re-integrating into the community as productive and empowered contributors.
• We launched an After-Care Program! This program is designed to support and monitor the progress of our graduates for up to three years—we are currently serving more than 200 women and children in After Care.
• We provided Thanksgiving AND Christmas to not only the 116 women and children living in our Shelter, we were able to provide Thanksgiving and Christmas to more than 60 graduate families!
• We served more than 1300 women and children in advancing from a point of crisis to a position of self-sufficiency—almost a 20% increase over the number of women and children we served in 2006!

While we have made monumental strides in 2007, only some of which are detailed above, we have seen a staggering increase in the numbers of homeless women with children in need of St. John’s services. Despite our 100-bed capacity, our average capacity in 2007 was 105 women and children. Our average capacity so far in 2008 is 110 women and children. But what troubles us most is that as of December, we are now turning away more than 100 women and children each day. This is up from 25 women and children per day during the first half of 2007.

I am also troubled to report that while we have made much progress in finding affordable housing for our successful graduates (see chart below), almost ½ of our successful graduates get fed back into the system. There is simply not enough affordable housing for these families – despite having graduated successfully from our Program.

I can think of no other word to use but “crisis”. But the good news is that we have been developing a plan to address this crisis issue. The Board of Directors of St. John’s has committed to launching our own affordable (a.k.a transitional) housing program. This will this allow us to better ensure that our successful graduates secure housing. It will also help us with our capacity issues as we’ll be able to move families out of St. John’s smoothly into transitional housing allowing more families to be served. We have begun discussions with various city and county officials as well as local developers to put together the pieces necessary to execute this plan.

How can you help?

We cannot take this important step without your support. We need to ask you each to tap into your network of friends and family who might be able to lend their talents to help us. Do you know any landowners, architects, developers and financiers who might like to work with us? Please let me know at 453-1482 or at msteeb@stjohnsshelter.org.

In the meantime, please continue to support us as both as volunteers and donors. I can say in all sincerity that the work we do with these families is nothing short of miraculous, and we need your support to continue it.

Finally, you can help us by spreading the St. John’s story… single women with children need our help to survive in Sacramento County, and we need the support of all members of this community to get them on the path of self-sufficiency.