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Homeless aid group rises from ashes

(Explore Howard) -- In the wake of a devastating 2008 fire that destroyed the operational center of its business, a Columbia nonprofit fighting homelessness in Howard County has emerged with a new mission and vision for the future.

Bridges to Housing Stability, formerly Congregations Concerned for the Homeless, has a new name and an expanded vision to focus on ways to prevent homelessness in the county, rather than simply serving those who are already homeless, Executive Director Jane O’Leary said.

“We’ve come to understand that homelessness won’t be ended by adding new shelter beds,” she said.

The organization still operates 21 residences as transitional housing for the homeless. But it also offers services that include linking families to resources that can help with budgeting and money management, working on landlord-tenant mediation and finding legal solutions to problems such as rent disputes. Case managers also work with families to examine why their housing is not stable, O’Leary said.

“Our board came to ask itself why, after 20 years of doing this, are there countless homeless people still waiting for our housing. They started to look farther upstream to prevention of homelessness,” O’Leary said.

She said the organization also wanted to shed its old name, to get rid of stigmatizing people with the “homeless” label, and to have a more secular title, as most of its funding comes from secular sources.

“Although there are a number of congregations who are involved in our work it’s really not the whole story anymore,” she said.

The new program began only in the past month and got its first referrals a couple of weeks ago from Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center, the county’s homeless shelter, O’Leary said. The organization plans to help about 60 people a year.

Andrea Ingraham, executive director of Grassroots, said the relationship is a positive one.

“Jane really has a very community-oriented approach as far as collaborating with other agencies,” she said.

With federal stimulus funding coming in from the government and $120,000 in funding coming from the Horizon Foundation in Columbia and other private donations, Grassroots and Bridges to Housing Stability are making inroads into preventing homelessness, Ingraham said.

“What we’re really working on now is pooling our talents and  resources to preventing homelessness,” she said. “What we need to do is look harder for people who are potentially on that path to losing a house.”

Bridges to Housing Stability also works with other organizations in the area, including churches, law enforcement, foundations and groups like Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Maryland. It also finds mentors for children, by pairing them up with older people.

Bridges to Housing Stability has seven employees and operates on a $600,000 annual budget, mostly funded by federal, state and local grants and foundations. It also receives aid from individuals, churches and businesses, O’Leary said.

While no one was injured in the Dec. 30 2008 fire at 10720 Little Patuxent Parkway, where Congregations Concerned for the Homeless was housed, the blaze caused about $1 million in damages to the building, fire officials said at the time. O’Leary’s organization had all of its files on applicants, clients and other information destroyed by the fire, she said.

“We had to start from scratch with all our data,” she said last week.

The long, arduous process of reconstructing files is now over, she added, and the trauma of the experience is fading.

“It’s been quite an ordeal. On the positive side we made a commitment on the day of the fire that we were not going to interrupt our client services in any way,” she said.