Sainquta Jones and Katie Kiger watched their children chase each other through New Hope Family Shelter with pom-poms, keeping an eye on the chaos while catching up on daily apartment life.
New Hope is an emergency shelter that provides housing for about 90 days to family units — children and their legal guardians — with no restrictions on marital status, sexual orientation or religion.
The shelter celebrated its fifth anniversary with an open house party Thursday evening and a cake reading, “Happy 5th Birthday, New Hope!”
For the small children dashing and toddling their way through the shelter, the party was a way to spend time with good friends.
Jones and Kiger lived in New Hope briefly, and Jones’ children remain in the shelter’s day care program.
As her children have left the program, Kiger said the anniversary party was a way for them to see the other kids.
As none of her three children eat cake, meeting with friends was their reason for attending.
“They like to say ‘Hi’ to their friends every once in a while,” Kiger said.
Kiger spent exactly a month with her children “in a room that would fit inside this one” at New Hope before moving into their apartment.
“We loved it,” she said.
Elaine Guinn, the shelter’s executive director since 2012, said the party was themed to reflect the shelter’s youth.
The Easter-green streamers and pom-poms, finger sandwiches and bite-sized vegetables, and squares of cake also suited New Hope’s knee-high demographic.
The main rooms in the shelter on 2nd Street were packed with current and former house members, as well as volunteers, staff and curious lookers-in.
“I haven’t found anything comparable to New Hope nationally,” Guinn said. “A single dad can live with his children, next to a single mom, a same-sex couple.”
According to the 2014-2015 report from New Hope, the shelter expanded from a single home to four buildings in the last five years.
In 2014 and 2015, the staff provided temporary shelter to 117 people in 36 families, not including those they put up temporarily at local motels.
Between July 2012 and June 2014, 58 percent of those helped moved into stable housing.
However, the families New Hope shelters have also undergone a change, Guinn said.
Familial homelessness is a growing problem in the U.S., she said.
“In the early days of New Hope, we had a lot of single mothers and their children,” Guinn said. “Today, every family here is a two-parent household.”
According to Stats Indiana, Monroe County had the highest poverty rate in Indiana in 2014.
High rent prices are also a barrier to finding housing, Guinn said.
In 2012-2014, almost 20 percent of families at New Hope “doubled up” with another family or friend to find a place to live, according to the shelter’s report.
“A lot of people are on the edge,” she said. “In recent months, we’ve had three parents here who have had master’s degrees.”
Guinn said she sees homelessness as a potential fresh start for families in need.
In the spirit of new beginnings, she said the shelter looks for reasons to celebrate milestones.
“This isn’t the end of the road, it’s the beginning of something new,” she said. “Birthdays happen while people are here — sobriety, anniversaries — and it’s important to celebrate those things.”
