Families Moving Forward is unique because of the way our services are delivered. Unlike most emergency shelters, the families in our emergency shelter do not sleep together in a 24-hour central facility. Instead, our overnight services are provided in a network of Minneapolis area congregations.

Each congregation hosts our families 2 - 4 times a year, for a week at a time. In most of these congregations, each family has a private sleeping room. Everything that each family needs for the week is provided by the volunteers from the congregation: food, beds, and fellowship. During the day the families in our shelter make our Day Center their home base, going to and from school or jobs, looking for employment and housing, caring for preschoolers.

The Day Center has facilities for bathing, doing laundry, cooking and eating, playing, reading, watching TV and doing homework. Families Moving Forward staff is always available to provide suggestions, resources, guidance and support. We are also unique because of the way we think about our clients. Our congregational volunteers generally think of their place of worship as an extension of their home and their fellow volunteers as an extension of their family. This is why the families we serve are called our "guests" and why our staff and volunteers work very hard to make our shelter as "homelike" as possible.

Another unique aspect of our shelter is the way our services are paid for. Most other shelters in the Minneapolis area are funded by counties and by fees paid by homeless families. Families Moving Forward is different -- all of our services are supported by donations from individuals, families, congregations, corporations and foundations. We also have some government support, in the form of grants for specific expenses or programs.

Families Moving Forward provides emergency shelter for six to 10 families at a time. In 2008 the emergency shelter served 191 individuals, in 55 families; of these individuals, 63% were children; nearly half the children were under six years old. Over 15 years, we have served more than 1,000 families, more than 3,500 people.

Of all the families who exited the emergency shelter in 2008, 58% moved from the shelter to permanent housing or long-term transitional housing. Counting only those families who completed the Families Moving Forward program, 92% moved to permanent housing or long-term transitional housing.

Former residents of our shelter, our alumni, are welcome to call or come back for referrals to other agencies, for toiletries and household items and for our monthly Alumni Dinner.