Centers still deliver hope, help to Hawaii families

Every Sunday for months Leilani Cortez and her kids had to pack up and move.

As a homeless family enrolled in the Family Promise of Hawai‘i program, each week they would start over at another church, settling into sleeping and bathroom arrangements, and making new friends.

While Cortez found the weekly moves somewhat jarring, she said, “It was way better than being on the street or at the beach.”

Family Promise, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in March, has provided shelter to about 400 families, including 1,500 individuals on Oahu, according to program manager Christy MacPherson.

It opened in 2006 with a center in Kailua. A center in downtown Honolulu followed a year and a half later. The centers provide families with a daytime place to shower, do laundry, attend financial budgeting classes, use computers or just relax. Those who enter the program are required to hold jobs, and “we don’t accept anyone drinking or using drugs,” MacPherson said.

Cortez joined the Family Promise program in November after her family was evicted from their Kahaluu rental, and she couldn’t find a place she could afford as a working single mother.

“At first it was very traumatizing, just the fact that we were homeless,” Cortez said. “Family Promise took the edge off of being homeless, like they were giving us time to take a deep breath” while searching for more permanent housing.

Both day centers help up to five families (14 individuals) at a time, and a van takes them to “host sites” in the evening for dinner and sleeping. In the morning they are picked up and taken back to the center.

Across Oahu there are 65 host sites, mostly churches of various denominations, that provide sleeping arrangements or other types of support, such as food and household supplies.

Most of the families spending time at the Kailua center are local residents who are willing to uproot their family from Honolulu to go to the Windward side just to get off the street, she said. Since its opening, the center has served about 140 families and 515 individuals, with 12 churches rotating as weeklong host sites.

The Honolulu center sees a heavier demand for serv-ices, with most guests from Micronesia, Chuuk and the Marshall Islands, MacPherson said. It also has a “waitlist” program through which five more families use the center during the day and receive case management until overnight host sites become available, she said.

Guests learn strategies for budgeting their money and saving enough for a first month’s rent or deposit, which are subsidized by grants from nonprofits. Of all the families that have completed the program, “less than 20 percent return to homelessness,” MacPherson said. “Most evolve and get into better situations.”

Last week Cortez moved into her own home with assistance from the city’s Rent to Work program.

While moving from church to church as part of the Family Promise program, she said, “Every Sunday I would cry because we’d have to move. It was hard for me. For the first two or three months, I was always sad on Sundays.” Now, Cortez said, “It’s very emotional, finally having your own place and knowing you’re not in the shelter anymore.”

Besides basic provisions and life skills guidance, she said other benefits tied to Family Promise can be lasting relationships with other struggling families and volunteers. Cortez said volunteers made living in limbo much easier to bear by providing “very good dinners,” organizing activities for the kids and simply making “sure we were comfortable.”