House of Ruth

House of Ruth’s mission is to “empower women, children and families to rebuild their lives and heal from trauma, abuse, and homelessness.”

• Our goals for the women and families in our 13 housing-based programs at House of Ruth are to:

o Prepare for independent living
o Understand the impact of the trauma they have experienced, learn effective coping skills, and take steps forward on the journey to healing
o Develop a network of support and services to protect against future homelessness
o Exhibit positive parent-child interactions, resulting in healthy and sustained relationships for all family members
o Acquire and sustain a greater self-sufficiency and stability for each woman or family as they move into their own permanent housing
o Achieve safety and stability

• At Kidspace, our therapeutic child development center, our goals are for the children to overcome their developmental delays and establish a life-long love of learning while their parents acquire the skills to be positive partners in their child’s development and education.
• At the Domestic Violence Support Center, our goal is for clients to achieve safety and stability, while improving their daily functioning.

Our strategies are to carefully build and effective therapeutic relationship with each person who is in our care. To house and serve them in nurturing, low-density surroundings, and to provide individualized services that build on the person's strengths while addressing their needs. This includes case management, counseling, and life skills support. Our services are intensive, with multiple interactions daily between our staff and the participants. The duration is long, with the typical stay being 18-24 months. We have found that it takes one to two years for a woman to recover from life-long abuse, adult domestic violence, homelessness and to build the skills for independent living.

We offer trauma-informed childcare with speech and occupational therapy onsite, available to help children overcome developmental delays and to support parents in positively engaging in their child’s development. Our Domestic Violence Support Center has licensed mental health counselors who deliver free, unlimited one-on-one counseling to trauma survivors, as well as group counseling at other House of Ruth programs and community partner agencies.

House of Ruth follows the model of providing trauma informed care, a standard best practice for serving victims of domestic violence. In addition to helping survivors access safety, housing, and financial and legal resources, trauma informed care requires that House of Ruth help survivors strengthen their psychological capacity to deal with the complex issues they face in recovering from the effects of trauma, and re-building their life.

Our greatest strength is the capability of our staff to establish positive, healthy, therapeutic relationships with the women and children who we serve. We employ social workers and psychotherapists to assist the women and children as well as consulting therapists in psychiatry, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy. Our staff is skilled, compassionate and dedicated.

In addition, House of Ruth has earned the support of thousands of contributors who annually give more than $3.5 million to support our programs and services. These precious revenues enable us to lift our services from merely adequate to excellent.

House of Ruth also competes effectively for more than 20 government grants and contract annually in which our performance and financial accountability are closely monitored.

88% of the women and of the families that participate in our service-enriched housing programs for at least one year are able to secure and sustain safe and stable permanent housing after they leave House of Ruth.

88% of the children who are served at Kidspace, our therapeutic child development center, achieve their developmental targets after one year of services (some will take longer than a year to “catch up”.

At our Domestic Violence Support Center, clients are healing from trauma and finding new stability in their lives. 87% of clients meet at least 2 treatment goals and report improvement in their daily functioning after 6 months of treatment.