Hope Restorations Inc

Our chief aim is to help as many adults as possible become restores to fully self-sustaining, stable, productive citizenship in the community. We use our funding to pay the workers chosen from our waiting list of recovering addicts and/or previously incarcerated adults. This paid work provides them a critical tool for their transformation and recovery while allowing us to come alongside them in a deeply relational process of coaching and mentoring intended to help them rediscover their hope by rediscovering their intrinsic human value and the gifts they have to share with others. We also necessarily use our funding to buy the buildings and/or building materials needed to provide this work opportunity. In the process, we ultimately provide housing that has been renovated to more modern safety and energy efficiency standards, which then affords us the opportunity to engage with our tenants in a trusting relationship so that we can mentor and coach them toward better socio-economic opportunities and outcomes. In each of these relationships with our workers (clients) and our tenants, we discuss how we can work together to improve our community and we encourage everyone to share their gifts and goodness with their neighbors and community. Because we work with a relatively small number of participants at any one time, this type of work is rather hard to measure quantitatively or statistically, but we're seeing lives and transformed right before our eyes. Our approach is deeply relational and highly collaborative.

Our main strategies are: 1. Deeply relational - By this we mean that we strive to build meaningful and trustful relationships with all of our participants. This provides the foundation upon which we can work together to identify and overcome each individual's barriers to success. In our coaching and mentoring, we place a lot of emphasis on employability such as attitude, reliability, team spirit, problem solving, respectfulness, professionalism etc. While we're working on these topics daily in the course of our renovation work, we're connecting our participants with our partnering agencies to provide formal education, social services, mental health and health care, dental care, job placement and any other service or resource which may be helpful. 2. Social Enterprise - We're doing work that could be done for profit, but instead are doing it for the benefit of our community. Each of our completed projects becomes a high quality, safe, energy-efficient home for low income families. Though it costs more to renovate these eyesore properties and we could resale them for, the long term revenue will do its job while our tenants benefit from below-market rental rates on quality housing as well as utility bills significantly lower than their neighbors with similar sized/constructed houses that have not been renovated. 3. Highly collaborative - We believe that resources are precious, therefore, we strive to never replicate a service that already exists in our community. This leads us to partner and collaborate with others as much as possible, which we believe ultimately helps everyone be more effective and better stewards of the available resources.

We're employing a very unique approach, that once refined, can be replicated in communities all over our country. We have few other organizations we can call to ask advice. We have found a few organizations who are similar in some way, and from those we share and glean best practices and lessons learned, but we have yet to find an organization taking our same approach and tactics. That said, our leadership is passionate about and understands both the need for our work and the uniqueness of our approach. We are problem solvers. We're not afraid to fail, but we're committed to making this work effectively. We're adaptive while remaining true to our mission. Our board and staff have the education, experience, and drive to guide Hope Restorations to become a fully self-sustaining social enterprise over the next 4-6 years. Along with this, our largest funder provides not only monetary support, but also provides a wide array of consultants to help us with our strategic planning, board development, and other important organizational development topics. We have come a long way since our inception, and we've earned great credibility in our community and region, so much so that several nearby communities are asking us to expand into their county.

Since our inception, we've acquired 40 properties. As of March 2020, 25 of these are in rental. The remaining are in various states of renovation or waiting to begin. In 2019, our transitional housing partner closed and donated the house to us. We renovated the 7,000 sq ft house to become both our office and our House of Hope which is equipped to house and help up to 20 adult males at a time. We've also be given a commercial property which was originally built as a medical/dental office. We are renovating this structure to become our House of Hope for Women. There is no service like this for women in our area. Though we have never excluded women from our Hope Restorations employment and training program, and there are many women needing and wanting the kind of program we have, there are few who are willing to do the heavy residential construction work we have available, and the few women who are willing soon find themselves uncomfortable working so outnumbered by men. As we renovate the House of Hope for Women, we are busy planning and fundraising to launch a new social enterprise more appropriate for women so that we can offer them the deeply relational pathway to restoration while also providing the organization the long-term economic self-sustaining component so critical to our unique model.