Stabilizing Families Through Collaborative Efforts

For the last year and a half, I have been involved with a suburban group called the Community Support Center. We are working together to stabilize families housing situations through a unique partnership of school districts, churches, county/municipalities, business and agency representatives.

We began because many of us were dealing with the same families and duplicating our efforts with very limited resources and results. We wanted to make a bigger impact and felt that pooling our resources and coordinating services would create a bigger impact for those we serve.

The Community Support Center began providing services through a foundation grant and support from Ramsey County and several local churches. We started out coordinating finacial crises support for rental assistance, utilities, moving etc.

However, our desire was to focus more on partnering with families, building long-term relationships and providing an environment to help families move into stable living situations.

Over the last couple months we have been working to find a partner agency that will coordinate the crises support so that the Community Support Center can focus on building relationships and long-term family stability.

So moving forward will be training volunteers to walk alongside families and together figure out permanent solutions out of poverty. Having neighbors partnering with neighbors will be our main focus moving forward.