Finding Home
Keeping families housed — because preventing homelessness costs far less, and hurts far less, than resolving it.
This program is temporarily suspended
We are not currently accepting new requests for housing or utility assistance. If you need help now, these York County organizations can assist: Bell Socialization, Community Progress Council, LifePath Christian Ministries, and the York County Planning Commission.
We intend to reopen it. Doing so takes people and funding — see volunteering if this is your heart.
What the program does
Most homelessness services necessarily begin after a family has already lost their housing. Finding Home works earlier, in the weeks when the outcome is still open — when there is a judgment but not yet a lockout, an arrearage but not yet an eviction.
In practice that has meant:
- Negotiating directly with landlords and property managers, using relationships built over years in the local real-estate industry
- Funding grants that satisfy a judgment or clear the arrearage that would otherwise end in eviction
- Coordinating with partner organizations through the York County Coalition on Homelessness when the need exceeds what we can fund alone
- Building a household budget with the family, including an emergency fund, so the same crisis does not return
- Following up afterward, and adjusting the plan as circumstances change
The follow-through is the part that matters most and is easiest to skip. A grant that resolves this month's crisis without changing anything else simply moves the eviction to a later date.
What we have seen
Since Families Renewed was founded in 2013, we have worked with roughly 150 families. The pattern in that work is consistent: referrals arrive late, often with a lockout date days away; the families who come through it are the ones who stay engaged after the immediate emergency passes; and every partner organization in the county reports the same thing — need that exceeds available resources.
That last point is why we hold to prevention. Meeting a family's housing need before they are evicted costs a fraction of what it costs to rehouse them afterward, and it spares a child the part that does the lasting damage.
Child and family advocacy
Alongside direct assistance, this program includes advocacy — coordinating multi-agency services around a single child or family so their actual needs are what the plan is built on, and carrying what we learn to the stakeholders and decision-makers whose choices shape whether families keep their housing.