Hope Partnership is the culmination of hard work, perseverance, and more than a few tears. My team has worked tirelessly over the past ten years to reduce homelessness in our community, and though we may not be there yet, just imagine how far we’ve come. Over the past 10 years, we’ve served over 100,000 heartbeats. Just imagine that number, over 100,000!
Just last year, between January and September: we navigated 116 heartbeats into stable housing, hosted hundreds of our neighbors at Cares days, connected 66 heartbeats to permanent employment, connected nearly 1,400 heartbeats with identification services, and opened this new service space in downtown Kissimmee. I’m constantly amazed at how far we’ve come over the last decade. None of this work would be possible without you, our incredible supporters. And we couldn’t have done any of this work without the amazing team at Hope Partnership.
In the early days of this organization, I swore we would never get into housing. These days, I spend the majority of my time working to develop dignified, affordable, attainable housing for those people who form the backbone of our workforce. I’ve learned to avoid saying never. Where others see dilapidated hotels that have outlived their use and empty lots of blighted land, we see spaces to create communities where families heal from the traumas of poverty and homelessness neighborhoods where children grow up surrounded by love and support. Everyone deserves a safe place to call home, and we have the power to make that happen in Central Florida.
How we do this work is just as important as what we do. That’s why we are working as an agency to embed trauma-informed and trauma-responsive principles into every aspect of our organization. I’m looking forward to earning certification as a Trauma-Informed agency, then sharing what we’ve learned with our partners who serve this community with us.
As we look toward the next decade, our vision is a Central Florida where poverty and homelessness are issues of the past. We can get there together.
Rev. Mary Downey is the President/CEO of Hope Partnership, which works to end systematic poverty and homelessness in Osceola County.
