Family Promise of Effingham, a church-supported program to help the homeless, has begun offering transitional housing. The first recipient is a mother and her 11-year-old daughter.
Since the program started helping homeless families last June, two families have graduated from the three- to four-month course. The program offers housing at area churches while helping with financial and job training and job searches.
The first family was able to find a house to rent after the Family Promise program ended, but the second, the mother and daughter, was not as fortunate.
“We’d gotten to the point where we were running out of options for her,” said Ashley Moore, executive director.
She said there’s a long waiting list for income-based housing in Effingham and those properties look at people’s credit scores, which usually are poor for homeless families.
“People can’t always move from complete dependency to complete independence in 90 days,” said the Rev. Melissa S. Traver of Rincon United Methodist Church, who is on the board of Family Promise and who saw the need for transitional housing for those who complete the program.
The church offered to let the mother and daughter stay, for as long as six months, in a two-story house it owns in Rincon. The top floor has two bedrooms and the bottom floor has a living area and kitchen that Boy Scouts use once a week for meetings.
Traver said the church had allowed a couple of families to stay in the house briefly during the last year or so, “in kind of a happenstance kind of way.”
She said the church members hadn’t really thought of using the building for housing, but the two families were able to make it work and they thought a Family Promise family also might be able to make it work.
“Maybe God is leading us,” she said.
The mother has a job in retail in Pooler, but has a poor credit score and was having trouble finding a place to stay in her home county of Effingham, Moore said.
The woman is trying to rebuild her life and her credit after going through a difficult divorce, Moore said.
Moore said there is transitional housing in Savannah, but the woman wanted to stay in Effingham with her daughter, and the house owned by Rincon United Methodist is the first transitional housing she knows of in the county.
Moore and Traver said they hope others in the community, such as landlords and churches, will consider renting space to families who complete the Family Promise program but are still building their credit and waiting to qualify for more permanent housing.
Moore also said the mother is in line to get a donated, used car soon through Gerber Collision and Glass in Savannah.
Family Promise has begun working with a third family and will add two more families in the next few weeks, Moore said.
The group will hold its second annual Bed Race to End Homelessness at 9 a.m. on March 21 at Effingham County High School. The $100 entry fee goes to support the program.
More information can be found at www.effinghamfamilypromise.org and www.rinconumc.com.