Project Hope Boston

The original mission of Project Hope's housing services department was to find affordable housing for families living in our family shelter. While we continue that work today, our services have expanded to support families experiencing housing instability through eviction prevention and housing search/placement. Our team provides housing counseling, eviction prevention, landlord negotiation, housing assistance, budgeting advice, and emergency rental funds. We also have members of our team who work at two department of transitional assistance offices and meet with homeless or at-risk families to provide support and alternatives to shelter. Housing services served 1,334 families experiencing housing instability or homelessness.

Project Hope's family shelter, founded in 1981, was one of the first emergency homeless shelters for families in the state of Massachusetts and continues to address the urgent need for emergency transitional housing in our community. We offer a nurturing environment for 11 women and their children at a time. The families we partner with face a number of barriers to housing stability, including long wait lists for public housing, fewer subsidies for market rate housing, rising rents, rising costs for heat, food instability, lack of access to quality childcare, and few slots in job training programs. Each family we serve has a private room and access to a communal kitchen, dining room, living room and children's activity. The shelter stabilizes families through case management and housing search to assist them in finding safe and affordable housing. Families are also connected to Project Hope's workforce and education programming. The shelter is a model for a respectful and empowering approach that prioritizes helping women gain confidence and prevail against tremendous odds. Each family we serve has a private room and access to a communal kitchen, dining room, living room and children's activity playroom. The shelter stabilizes families through case management and housing search to assist them in finding permanent housing.

In 1988, Project Hope launched the family childcare business enterprise, an innovative venture to support home-based childcare providers. Known today as the family childcare network (fcc), this program provides technical support, professional training, and support to women to help them establish home-based daycares that focus on quality care and education. Many of our providers are multi-lingual and provide much needed bilingual/bicultural childcare to immigrant and non-immigrant families alike. Fcc providers are licensed with the department of early education and care. We offer opportunities to participate in college level child development courses and a range of educational and professional development opportunities on an ongoing basis. These include trauma-informed care, safety, child development, business ownership, and curriculum development. In fy22, 92 children were cared for by 23 educators within our network.

In 1990, Project Hope established the adult education services program to meet the educational needs of low-income and homeless women. In 1996, the workforce development department was founded to assist low-income residents, particularly single mothers, gain workforce skills and access career opportunities. After offering these two services as standalone programs, we combined them into the workforce and education department in 2019 to better serve our families. This ensures that no matter their entry point into Project Hope, all participants will benefit from a career pathway focus that will enable them to develop the education, training, and skill development necessary to obtain, retain, and improve employment. Workforce and education offer low-income women, primarily from roxbury and north dorchester, basic education, and english learning classes, as well as a range of job training programs for employment skills, career exploration, and expertise specific to administrative jobs in healthcare. We leverage employer partnerships to help every program graduate secure a job or internship and we provide continued support throughout their first year of employment. In fy22, we served 100 students in esol classes and 158 students in workforce training.