Thank you so much for supporting and journeying with us this year! God is so faithful in sending us amazing people like you and with your help this year we have accomplished great things. We wanted to take this time to look back on what we’ve achieved thanks to your support, and to look forward to where God is leading us next.

Million Dollar Match

Our biggest accomplishment this year, and perhaps our biggest accomplishment ever, was raising one million dollars to hit our one million dollar matching goal, giving us two million dollars. All of these funds are going towards our creation of the Homeless to Healthy program, the first men’s residential christian recovery program between San Jose and San Francisco.

This has been a dream and goal of ours for years, and we are so happy our community of support has grown enough to allow us to reach it!

With the funds secured, we were able to begin finalizing the details of the program and bring on the first staff members for it! To that end, we expanded our team by bringing on Ricky Wade, as the Overseer of Spiritual Direction.

Collaboration

This year we worked on a number of collaborations with organizations that are committed to serving the homeless communities.

We partnered with San Mateo County for the second year in a row with their 4R program, an environmental initiative focused on finding ways to prevent waste from reaching the landfill.

The services we provide prevent food and clothes from being wasted, instead providing them to those who need it most. Through our collaboration, we were able to increase the volume of the food we take in and the quality of our meals.

We also joined four other organizations in creating a joint proposal to San Mateo County to pool our resources and staff to help change the way outreach is done and get more people off the streets than ever before. It’s called “Working Together to End Homelessness,” and now that it is finalized it will be an incredible force for good in our community.

The proposal and the associated funds are allowing us to bring on a full time staff member dedicated to outreach, Danny Hays, in addition to our existing outreach team. This will help make sure we have someone on the streets for more hours of the day than we have previously been able to, and allow us to reach, build relationships with, and help more people than ever before.

The Numbers

 

This year we distributed 5,800 articles of clothing through the clothing van, approximately 4,800 pounds of clothes. We also distributed exactly 21,867 pounds of food.

We met without fail a total of six times a week at three locations in the Bay Area- that is 312 times we met this year.

Street Club

Just this past month we launched Street Club! Street Club is an exclusive club for our recurring donors, with exclusive events, special gifts, and behind the scenes info. To join, all you have to do is set a recurring donation for 50$ a month or more! All new reoccurring donations started this December will be quadrupled, so now is the perfect time to partner with us!

You can join by making a recurring donation here on Every or here on Paypal

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This Year

This has been an incredible year for us. We made huge progress in making the Homeless to Healthy program a reality, something we’ve been planning and working on for five years. We received record numbers of people at several of our sites. We expanded our team, allowing us to greatly expand and improve the ways we can help people, as well as just increase the amount of hours we are able to spend dedicated to improving the lives of the least fortunate among us.

It’s amazing how much growth we have had consistently every year, and we owe it all to our community of incredible supporters, like you. We’ve grown to the point where we now can help show so many homeless people the loving compassion of God, through community, friendship, and meeting all of their physical needs such as food, clothing, medical supplies and helping them get into housing.

This next year will be an important one for us. We are going to find a building to rent or purchase to serve as the location for the Homeless to Healthy Program, then, once we have that in place, officially launch the program and take in the first few clients. We are expanding our outreach team to reach people in ways we’ve never been able to before, while focusing on and expanding our regular services. We’ve been so grateful for our community’s support through these past years and we need everyone’s continued support to help see all these amazing programs we’ve begun to their completion, and to keep them going years into the future.

While this has been a big year for us in preparing for the imminent launch of the homeless to healthy program, our focus on it has caused us to drain our reserves and general fund we use to keep our six times a week street services going. Because of this, we now have a huge need to fundraise and work on our reserve to keep these vital services going. Our regular services are the heart of what we do. There is no greater way to care for someone than feeding them when they are hungry, while providing love and friendship. We not only want to make sure our services keep going, but we want to expand them, taking in more people and opening more locations up north, and we need your help to do so. That is why we are asking that you support us during this extremely impactful time. In order to keep our services going we need your direct financial support through donations to keep providing life saving supplies and life changing love.

You can donate to us here and see all donation options here.

All donations made this December will be matched and doubled up to $55,000, and all new recurring donations will be quadrupled!

God Bless you, and may you be blessed for all the compassion you have shown,

–Street Life Ministries