Frequently Asked Questions
Please click on a question below:
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Does the Whosoever Gospel Mission receive any money from the government?
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Is it wise and safe to have Hannah's Place so close in proximity to the men's program?
Q: How is the Whosoever Gospel Mission
funded?
A: The Whosoever Gospel Mission is funded 100% through private funding.
We rely on donations from individuals and churches, foundation and
corporate grants, matching gifts and thrift store sales. Our
confidence and faith is in a loving and gracious God who has faithfully
given us our daily bread for 115 years (Psalm 23).
The Whosoever
Gospel Mission is a tax-exempt 501 (c) (3) non-profit charity. As
such, your gifts are 100% tax deductible. You can also feel good
about knowing that more than 80% of your gift goes directly to our
programs and less than 20% is used for management/general and
fundraising. These percentages are considered to be quite good and
acceptable by both governmental and private agencies who monitor and
evaluate non-profit organizations such as the Whosoever Gospel Mission.
Your gift is a sacred trust which we promise to use wisely and
carefully.
Although the Mission is not a financially well-endowed
organization, it is financially sound and has been blessed with solid
financial growth and stability over the last 20 years. For
example, prior to the fire, over the course of 20 years our staff grew
from 5 to 20 staff members, our budget grew from $250,000 to $1.7
million, and our New Life Program for homeless men matured and developed
into one of the most well-respected and recognized holistic and
effective programs in the Greater Philadelphia area. We recognize
that God is the source of all of these blessings, and we are grateful
that He has privileged us to be part of this life-changing ministry and
outreach.
Q: Does the Whosoever Gospel Mission receive
any money from the government?
A: No, the Mission does not receive any money from the government.
The Mission has made this choice because it is a Christian-based
organization. However, we do not discriminate whatsoever in our
admission policy and programs on the basis of religion - after all, our
name is the Whosoever Gospel Mission!
Q: How many men does the New Life Program
serve?
A: At full capacity, the New Life Program is equipped to serve 50 men at
one time. The Mission opened it's doors to 25 residents in the
Fall of 2008, and another 25 in January of 2009. This brings the
Mission up to full capacity, serving 50 men in our open-entry, open-exit long-term residential New Life
Program.
Q: Where will Hannah's Place be built?
A: Our Germantown property is the best place to build Hannah's Place.
We have the right zoning, we have good community support, and we have a 115
year track record of being a good neighbor. Hannah's Place would be
cheaper and easier to run if it is located on our Germantown property
rather than at another location. In addition, safe and suitable
locations to house homeless people are almost impossible to find in
Philadelphia. We are less than a block away from SEPTA bus and train
stations, and a City health clinic is one block away. We have several
schools and churches within walking distance, and we already have the
perfect spot for Hannah's Place to be built.
We plan to build
Hannah's Place on the large footprint of our old warehouse which burned
to the ground. Our old warehouse was originally a 180-bed
dormitory when
we bought it in 1895 (Philadelphia health codes were different back in
1895!). It became our 4-story warehouse when we
built a new dormitory for 48 men in 1911. After the arson fire, we
realized that it would make better sense to build a new warehouse next
to our Germantown Thrift Store rather than on its old footprint - we
could also connect the new warehouse to our thrift store and expand the
store. This in turn frees up the perfect spot to build Hannah's
Place.
Q: Is it wise and safe to have Hannah's Place so
close in proximity to the men's program?
A: Yes. Hannah's Place will be a completely self-contained secure
building with its own restricted key-card entry. Hannah's Place
will be locked at all times, and the men in the men's dormitory will not
be allowed in Hannah's Place, nor will we allow our men, women and
children to hang out together in the Mission's courtyard.
The
men's and women's programs will not share any common activities or
space. In the same way that we already have in place policies and
procedures for our male clients concerning female visitors to our men's
facility, we will also have wise and firm policies prohibiting our male
and female clients from fraternizing with each other.
It is also a
well-known fact in addiction recovery treatment that establishing a new
romantic relationship is detrimental to one's recovery from addiction.
To prevent this from happening on-site at the Mission, Hannah's Place
will have its own dining room, kitchen, chapel, computer lab and lounge
areas in a building that has no connecting passageway to the men's
dormitory. In addition to a wonderful indoor play area for the
children, Hannah's Place will even have an outdoor play and lounge area
on its roof for the moms and their children.
We know firsthand
that other facilities in Philadelphia and around the country that house
the homeless sometimes have very limited space and by necessity have their male and female clients share common space
such as dining rooms and lounge areas, or perhaps they will have the men
live on one floor and the women live on a different floor. We
believe that we will have an ideal situation in being able to have two
separate and distinct buildings. Other larger missions in the
country have told us that they wished they had our arrangement with two
completely separate and un-connected buildings.
One final
assurance - because of the large number of children and teens that
annually visit the Mission to do service projects, we already have in
place a policy which does not admit convicted sex offenders into our New
Life Program for men. We sincerely believe that Hannah's Place
will be the safest place in Philadelphia and beyond for our women and
children.
Q: When will Hannah's Place be built?
A: We are working hard to develop a plan to raise the money needed over
the next few years to build Hannah's Place. Our initial focus and
priority was to first repair and renovate our men's dormitory and
Germantown Thrift Store.
In addition to repairing the damage from the fire, we made long
overdue improvements to the men's dormitory (for example, a new kitchen
and new bathrooms). In the building design process, we also
discovered that we were now required to upgrade the men's dormitory to
bring it into conformity with the current building codes. As a
result, the cost of repairing, improving and upgrading our men's
dormitory and Germantown Thrift Store came to a total of about $3
million. Thankfully, we have most of this money already raised,
although we still need more funds to complete our $1 Million Rising
from the Ashes Comprehensive Campaign to plug the gap and bring our
residential men's program back to heath and wholeness.
Amazingly, Hannah's
Place, which will be a wonderful state-of-the-art, energy efficient,
brand new 4-story building with a total capacity for about 40 guests (a
combination of women and children) will cost $3.3 million, only $600,000
more than our repaired and renovated 50 bed men's dormitory which was
built in 1911. We discovered that building a new building is
almost cheaper than repairing and fixing up an old, fire and water
damaged building (at one point, we even wondered whether we should tear
down the old dormitory building and build new - but the high cost of the
demolition, the additional architectural and construction costs of
building new, and the additional time that would be needed to rebuild
the men's dormitory ruled out this option).
We realize that $3.3
million is a lot of money, but we believe that it is well worth it.
The fastest growing segment of homelessness in Philadelphia and across
the country is women with young children. The City of Philadelphia
acknowledges that this is a serious unmet need. Hannah's Place is
needed more than ever. In the next few months as we move toward
the successful rebuilding of our men's dormitory, we will share with you
how you can help make Hannah's Place a reality.
Q: Has the Mission developed a unique
program for Hannah's Place that takes into account the special needs and
struggles of women and children?
A: Yes. Our well-designed, compassionate and comprehensive
one-year New Beginnings Program for homeless moms and their young
children will provide the healing hope of God's love and will also
effectively equip a struggling and hurting woman with all of the skills,
resources and tools she needs to establish a stable home and a good life
for herself and her children. Our New Beginnings Program will not
be a carbon copy of our men's New Life Program, but rather it has been
carefully designed to meet the unique needs of women with young
children. We have been diligent to study and visit other programs
for women and children across the country and to incorporate the "best
practices" of those programs into our own New Beginnings Program.
Q: When will the new warehouse be built?
A: We would like to build the warehouse as soon as possible, but we have
decided to build it after we first build Hannah's Place for a number of
reasons:
(1) Our insurance settlement includes about $400,000 in
recoverable depreciation which we do not receive until we build a
building on the footprint of the building that burned - Hannah's Place
will satisfy our insurance award requirement. There is also an
urgency connected with the recoverable depreciation - it can be
forfeited if we do not build Hannah's Place within a reasonable period
of time;
(2) The need for Hannah's Place to help broken and hurting
homeless women with young children is very great, and the need is
growing;
(3) An ugly scar with raggedy and broken walls will remain on
our Germantown property until we build a new building on the footprint
of our building that burned. The demolition company was unable to
remove all of these raggedy looking and partially standing walls from
our destroyed warehouse because they hold up Stafford Street which is
behind the Mission. Hannah's Place will have its own brand new
retaining walls that will hold up Stafford Street so these raggedy and
partially destroyed walls will be removed once Hannah's Place is built;
(4) Since we needed to reopen our Germantown Thrift Store at the same time
as our men's dormitory, we have developed a workable plan to
effectively process donations and sufficiently stock our two thrift
stores by utilizing the 2nd and 3rd floors of our Germantown Thrift
Store, our large garage in Germantown and the already in-use efficient
processing area of our Lighthouse Thrift Shop in the Lawndale section of
Philadelphia. A new warehouse would certainly be ideal, and it
will be a great asset once it is built, but for now we can operate
adequately with the creative use of the resources we have.
The new
warehouse will cost $1.2 million. We believe that by having
Hannah's Place built first and fully operational before the new
warehouse, the Mission will benefit from many new volunteers and
supporters drawn to Hannah's Place who can also help build our new $1.2
million warehouse. A new warehouse would be the wonderful capstone
of our entire three-phase building project: Phase One - The Men's
Dormitory and Germantown Thrift Store, Phase Two - Hannah's Place, and
Phase Three - The New Warehouse and Thrift Store Addition.
