Contact:   Jenn Gauthier-Lyke - 314.546.9684

Sweet Dreams!

Delmar Gardens’ residents, family members and staff launch the Sweet Dreams by Delmar Gardens program benefiting Gateway Homeless Services, Missouri's largest 24-hour emergency shelter for women and children. This holiday season, Delmar Gardens approached Gateway Homeless Services to make sure homeless children had a special toy on Christmas morning. But, after a visit to the shelter, the Delmar Gardens Family knew they could make an impact on the lives of children experiencing homelessness in St. Louis all year long.  

Sweet Dreams by Delmar Gardens offers Delmar Gardens’ residents, family members and staff the opportunity to collectively use their creativity, resources and skills to make a difference in the lives of precious children dealing with the unimaginable burden of homelessness in our community. The shelter is a large, unfamiliar and sometimes frightening place, especially for young children. The Sweet Dreams program offers children the much needed comfort and security of a soft blanket and a special stuffed animal of their own.  As they fall asleep they will feel additional comfort in knowing that someone cares.  

Delmar Gardens of Meramec Valley: http://www.delmargardens.com/dgmeramecvalley/index_enhanced.php

Gateway Homeless Services: www.gatewayhomeless.org

Delmar Gardens, Meramec Valley
#1 Arbor Terrace
Fenton, MO 63026

Lessons from Communities

Communities are adopting new approaches to respond to family homelessness.  Resources are increasingly focused on helping families avoid homelessness and helping those that do become homeless quickly reconnect to housing in the community.  Across the country, leading communities are developing, testing and sharing innovative strategies.  They are collecting more reliable data on how families move in and out of homelessness, which facilitates the ability to refine interventions, evaluate outcomes, and ultimately expand successful initiatives.

For the last three years, Gateway Homelessness Services has achieved outstanding success in placing families into transitional and permanent housing and reducing the length of stay of persons in our shelter.  In 2009, 288 women and children were placed into transitional or permanent housing.  Gateway's role is to identify strategies for helping families move quickly into housing.  As the "go to" shelter for families in the metro area, our focus is to place families quickly and find new ways of helping families "reconnect" with housing.

This new report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness (www.naeh.org) identifies many of the innovative strategies now being implemented at Gateway and in the Continuum of Care for Ending Homelessness in St. Louis.

  ending_family_homelessness.pdf 137.33 Kb 05/08/2010, 09:08

CITY RECEIVES $1.5 MILLION HUD GRANT

ST. LOUIS- Mayor Francis Slay and Human Services Director William Siedhoff today announced that the City of St. Louishad received a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the 2009 Continuum of Care (CoC) grants process. 

The City successfully competed with thousands of cities across the country in securing this award that will support two new local projects that will offer critically needed housing support services to homeless individuals and families over the extended lifetime of the grant.

The newly funded projects are:

Catholic Charities:  Catholic Family Services Places for Fathers Plus - $1,016,205 This project will be the City’s third Safe Haven providing 29 units of permanent supportive housing for single, homeless men suffering from mental illness and co-occurring substance abuse disorders.

Gateway Homeless Services - $482,641 Gateway Homeless Services and Grace Hill Settlement House will partner on the Water Tower Transitional Housing project. This collaboration will provide 55 transitional beds for large homeless families.

Last December, HUD awarded nearly $1.4 billion through its Continuum of Care programs with St. LouisCityreceiving $8 million at that time. The grants announced today will build on that investment by funding new projects such as those through Catholic Charities and Gateway Homeless Services.

“The City of St. Louishas seen a 30% reduction in homelessness in the past three years,” said Mayor Slay.  “These new projects continue the great tradition of bringing quality services and housing to the homeless residents of the City via partnerships with non-profit providers of the Continuum of Care to End Chronic Homelessness.”

For more information on these and other homeless services programs, please contact the Homeless Services Division of the Department of Human
Services at 314-657-1704.

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Kara Bowlin

Press Secretary to the Mayor
City of St. Louis Mayor's Office
City Hall, Room 200
St. Louis, MO 63103
o. 314-622-3479
c. 314-651-5907
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

HOMELESSNESS PREVENTION & RAPID RE-HOUSING PROGRAM

For Information, Call:          1-877-70-HOPE-4U

City Receives $8.4 Million from American Recovery & Reinvestment Act

As a result of the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, the “Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program” (HPRP) was established.  Congress appropriated $1.5 billion for this program allowing communities to provide financial assistance and services to either prevent individuals and families from becoming homeless or help those who are experiencing homelessness to be quickly re-housed and stabilized.  Through these funds, the City of St. Louis received an allocation of $8.1 million from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) and nearly $300,000 from the State’s Department of Social Services’ allocation, a total of $8.4 million.

Gateway Homeless Services is a part of the Continuum of Care For Ending Homelessness, 55 organizations in St. Louis that work together and collaborate to provide services to St. Louis residents who require housing support or who are currently experiencing homelessness.  The strategic plan of our community focuses on ending homelessness.  The city's ten year plan to achieve this goal:

St. Louis City Continuum of Care for Ending Homelessness 10-Year Plan:

10 Year Plan to End Homelessness in St. Louis.pdf 962.86 Kb 05/03/2009, 01:30