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For the last several months, the nonprofit organization, Michigan Itinerant Shelter System Interdependent Out of Necessity (MISSION), has been working with Washtenaw County to provide unhoused families with children hotel rooms as they await housing assignment. Although this program was initially small, it ballooned to support 90 families, including 106 adults and 162 children (as of the week of March 22nd, 2023).
During this time, MISSION also contracted FedUp Ministries (at least through April 1st, 2023) to provide dinners to many of the families four days a week. Additionally, a little more than a dozen families regularly received breakfasts from MISSION’s Mercy House on Saturday.
Together, these programs allowed the families (and the learning, growing children within them) a respite from some of the challenges they face. After all, it’s difficult to be a kid, learning math, science, and reading, when you’re concerned about where you’ll sleep or when your next good meal will be. Not to mention, the additional challenges (aside from lack of housing, and food insecurity) that many of these families face are very high. Most families don’t have cars, so it’s hard for them to access food pantries and other aid organizations. Some have, or have parents, partners, or children with, illnesses like bipolar disorder or cancer. Some are getting out of situations that none of us want to be in. The last thing they need to worry about is housing and food.
As of May 1st, 2023, the control of the hotel stays program will be transferred from MISSION’s hands to those of the county. Even so, MISSION’s Mercy House will continue providing families in need with Saturday breakfasts from Mercy House as long as it has the capacity to do so.
Unfortunately, tragedy has recently struck the Ann Arbor community with the loss of a treasured leader and a few other personal losses. Mercy House will be closing throughout the month of May to give its leaders and the anxious community some much-needed time to recover. Although this time is necessary, this also means that the Saturday food deliveries to the families in the hotel stays program will be put on hold during the month of May.
My role in all this is that I deliver breakfasts from Mercy House to the hotel stays families on Saturdays. Even though Mercy House will close through May, I’m hoping that we will still be able to feed them. Many of these families are very food insecure, and there have been times in the past when some have been so hungry that we’ve had to send them emergency groceries. I’m willing to continue delivering food on Saturdays, but funds are necessary to do so. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to buy families food and groceries primarily at Aldi (an inexpensive, healthy, and more-sustainable supermarket) each Saturday and drive it over to the hotels.
Given that Aldi is extremely affordable, a little goes a long way. Even the smallest donations would help. The current goal of $825 (~$800 + GoFundMe fees) would allow us to allocate roughly $5 worth of food each Saturday to each person who, in other months, would receive breakfast from Mercy House. With around $5, for example, I could provide a person with a box of cereal and some powdered milk, or a 3-pound bag of mandarin oranges and a few bananas. For a family with one adult and three kids, one delivery could look like 8 bananas, a bag of mandarins, cheese cubes, blueberries, a Danimals yogurt pack, 6 fruit-and-grain bars, a box of cereal, and a half gallon of milk.
That said, if we’re able to surpass our goal of $825**, we could do even more for these families. We could expand the number of families that we serve on Saturdays, get them much-needed items like clothing, diapers, or can openers, get them more groceries to last longer throughout the week, and more. If this GoFundMe explodes, we can also help get them bigger items like phones or refurbished laptops (some certified refurbished laptops are as cheap as $35 online) that could enable them to work from home and access resources more easily. If it really explodes, we could even provide large things like daycare tuition scholarships for single mothers with young children, or larger tools that we know would give the families the sustained ability to do more things. Now that would be extremely empowering! Anything that is not used for the families (or GoFundme’s fees) will be either retained to support families after May or given to MISSION.
Thank you so much for reading! If you’re able to do so, please consider donating as little as $5 or as much as you’d like. If you’re unable to donate at this time, please consider sharing this to your network. By using our resources to empower these families with food, groceries, and tools, together, we can all be the solution.
To read more about this situation, see the articles below:
**The initial fundraising goal of $825 was updated to $1200 on 4/29/2023 so that we may achieve some of our stretch goals!**
**The edited goal of $1200 was updated to $1500 on 5/4/2023 so that we can continue to achieve more stretch goals!**
**The edited goal of $1500 was updated to $2000 on 5/15/2023 so that we can continue to achieve more stretch goals!**