Contact Key Legislators to Ensure Adequate Funding for Project Home

As the Minnesota legislative session nears the end, funding for agencies that address homelessness is still in flux. Funding is included in both the House and Senate bills that were voted out of the chambers into the conference committee.

Project Home is requesting significant and sustained funding in support of Heading Home Ramsey’s legislative request to set community-wide priorities to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring. Project Home is a key part of HHR.

For more than 25 years, Project Home has provided shelter and economic mobility for families with children experiencing homelessness. Before COVID, Project Home was a mobile shelter with 40 beds per month hosted at two Houses of Worship (churches and synagogues) each month. COVID forced us to change our model because the Houses of Worship were closed. Perhaps miraculously, we developed a unique public/private/faith partnership that relocated the shelter to a former convent at 1880 Randolph Avenue. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet said at Christmas in 2020, “There is room at the inn.”

Our Project Home guest families taught us that having private bedrooms, real beds, and minimal disruption allows the families to focus on the work they need to do to build family success. Families’ average length of stay decreased from 84 days to 66 days once they moved into the convent, and after six months in their new housing, 96% of our families say the new arrangement is working. This move also allowed us to increase from 40 beds to 100 beds.

This increased capacity helps reduce the number of families on the Ramsey County shelter waitlist. However, there are still not enough family beds in Ramsey County to meet the needs of all families with minor children experiencing homelessness.

Without increased and sustained governmental funding, this shelter would not be possible. Please contact the conference committee members listed below: