Clear Lake Area Chamber Of Commerce: Clear Lake Connections Podcast Episode 39 | Local People Helping Other Local People.

Press release from the Clear Lake Area Chamber Of Commerce:

November 3, 2021

This week on Clear Lake Connections Podcast presented by UTMB Health: Meet Ryan Kirksey, Board Chair at Family Promise of Clear Creek. In this week’s episode, Ryan discusses the ways Family Promise serves homeless families in our community and how their mother organization has more than 200 affiliates throughout the country. Ryan also talks about how homelessness is a problem a lot of people tend to forget about, the programs the folks at Family Promise of Clear Creek have implemented to make sure that their clients get the help they need from start to finish and how people can get involved by donating a meal or volunteering.

Family Promise of Clear Creek is an organization that helps to serve specifically homeless families. They talk a lot about how homelessness is such a problem and people forget a lot about homeless families. There are hundreds and thousands of families that are homeless right now in our community. They want to bring them out of this for the long run, not just temporarily. Their goal is to give them skills, resources and the things they need to get back on the right track.

They re- launched back in the community in 2017. They have served more than 50 families I this time and as of this year they usually have 50-60 people coming through their program each year to get the help and resources that they need. The need for help In this area is real. People need to start paying attention.

Family Promise gets data from the school district that over 875 children are designated homeless in CCISD. Between, Clear Creek, Pearland, Alvin, Friendswood and Dickinson, there are more than over 2,000 children that are labeled homeless. It is a shocking statistic because you do not picture families In this situation. There are a lot of people in our community deal with this. Over time this problem has been more and more prevalent. The best way to get involved is on ccfamilypromise.org where you will learn how to support and become a volunteer.

They rely heavily on their volunteers, and they have over 800 on their roster right now. They rely on relationships that they build with community organizations, but these organizations help them get volunteers and these organizations also help them prepare and plan meals and programs and through the course of these partnerships that is where a majority of these volunteers come from.

Ryan serves on the Board at Family Promise. It speaks very highly that he is coming out and talking about the organization. One of the best policies they have is that them as members do volunteer thy are not permitted to share their affiliation, so people know them on just a relationship basis. They are focusing on relationships and partnerships and as a nonprofit their business strategies are making them successful.

Their relationships with their clients from start to finish look like people calling for assistance and people sometimes are not in the framework of what they do and then they help them get to the right place. They specifically work with families that are either losing or have lost their home, they then go through screening and see what obstacles the family has had to go through and what are the needs that they have and how they can help them and how much time there is to help them. They want to go through all of the points to where they can put them on the right track to help and ten they help them by staying in touch after the fact. They also have a program to where they can cheaply buy a car form FP. They have a program where they pay first and last months rent and then they keep up with them after they “graduate”.

They really do focus on the family as a unit, and it is so important not only for the family but the kids because it truly is a very holistic program. They are always looking at all the circumstances and they want them to have a full set of skills when they leave. They have several people that they helped that now serve on committees/board and they have been powerful people that have moved up and completely changed their lives and they want to continue to stay involved

Specifically, a success story that he has developed that was with a graduate was with someone from new York and she was escaping a bad home life thee she came down to Texas to start over and wanted to be safe and take care of her daughter. She couldn’t get her feet off the ground; she was one of the first ones to start in the re vamped program and things were starting to look up for her and her life has completely changed through family promise and because of their role of getting her life to the point to when she was able to see that she could do it on her own and getting on the right path. She has been a big advocate for them in speaking with people who are currently in the program.

They are part of a larger national organization called Family Promise At Large and there are more than 200 affiliates throughout the country. There are many in the Houston area. When the re vamped they looked at this community and the numbers and they decided to really focus on this specific area and that’s how they then started at Family Promise of Clear Creek.

They want to help prevent things like this from happening by implementing new programs. Volunteering is the best way to get involved through classes, donating meals, or working with the churches. The past year has been tough with the pandemic, and they had to find innovate ways to make it work and people who have donated to them have made it possible for them to keep their organization growing.

They look for ways to get people involved, they are having a Gala on November 13th, and this will be a great way. They are taking donations and contributions here.

As much as they would like to end homelessness they feel comfortable in saying that they can fight the homelessness battle as long as they need to need to. Visit the website or contact Gayle Nelson if you would like to volunteer.

This press release was produced by the Clear Lake Area Chamber Of Commerce. The views expressed here are the author’s own.