Freedom House is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to serving all types of homeless families with children in the Green Bay/Brown County area – single Moms, single Dads and couples. But we don’t just provide food, clothing and shelter until these families find a place to live, we change lives.

By providing education and counseling; modeling appropriate behaviors and sound family practices; and offering spiritual guidance through our 8 to 12 week Family Life Advancement Program, we help families break the cycle of homelessness and hopelessness and give them the tools they need to become vibrant members of our community; self-sustaining, certainly, but also volunteers with a heart who give back to the community in abundance; moving into a “new normal” of being “givers” rather than “takers.”

Hope for children; help for families

Although our challenge is great, our approach is simple: We invest in parents and give hope to children. When we treat the people we serve like the success stories we know they can become, and not like a burden, we’ve discovered they simply amaze everyone they encounter.

Just as Jesus did, we throw a towel over our arm and ask, “How may WE serve YOU?” Then we teach the community’s “takers” to become its most sincere and ardent “givers.” We have found that while families need rules, structure and schedules, what they need even more is to feel valued and loved. You can give a family all the tools to manage finances, employment and household (which we do), but without an outpouring of love through service the improvements seldom stick.

Breaking the cycle

Freedom House Ministries believes that a “standard emergency shelter approach,” where families receive only their basic necessities of food, shelter and possibly a few leads on employment and housing, does nothing more than provide a short-term solution to a generational problem.

Freedom House meets the full challenge faced by homeless families by applying a holistic and tailor-made approach to the needs of each family – spiritual, emotional, psychological, intellectual, vocational and economic. It reaches into the very heart of the family, identifying the point of breakdown and connecting families with the resources needed to break their cycle of poverty, homelessness and hopelessness.