Steady Progress

I can't believe it's been a month since I updated the blog! They say a picture's worth 1,000 words, so here's 3,000 for you. We are still looking at October for moving residents in, and probably the first Friday in November for our Open House and Design Competition. Stay tuned for more details- the 1st week of September we should be able to finalize everything.

HOME recently distributed a flyer to local social service agencies, and the phone hasn't stopped ringing since. We typically get about 3 phone calls per day, mostly from women in crisis who are homeless or will become homeless in the next day or two. Unbelievably (or maybe not so unbelievably), emergency financial assistance for families with emergent housing needs is practically nonexistent. The usual next step is to refer the family to emergency shelter, but of course Osceola County has none. We attempt to connect them with shelters in Orange County, but the largest and most well-known ones have been completely full as of late. Most families I have spoken with have been able to stay with friends for a few nights and then move on to another house, or manage to borrow or scrape up enough money to get a motel room.

The next challenge is child care. 4C, the primary resource for subsidized child care, is also maxed out. This leaves families with young children in quite a bind- how do you go out and work to get the money to stay in the motel if there's no child care? Again, anecdotally I can say that most women are able to utilize social support networks to assist them with child care, but only for a limited time.

School starts in just a few weeks. When school let out a few months ago, we had just about 850 homeless school age children in Osceola County. As soon as I get updated numbers for the 07-08 school year, I will post the current statistics.


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