For Family Promise of Monmouth County, Home is Where the Heart Is

709

By Eileen Moon

OCEANPORT – The red brick building at 501 Malterer Ave. was as crowded as a holiday party last Friday as supporters of Family Promise of Monmouth County gathered to celebrate the official opening of the agency’s day center for homeless families on a site formerly part of Fort Monmouth.

For the board members, staff members, legislators, volunteers and donors who worked to make it happen, this was a moment to celebrate: A day to cut the ribbon on a reality that began as a dream – the dream of having a stable home for the agency whose mission is to help homeless families find stable homes of their own.

The nonprofit is one of three social service agencies supporting the homeless that was granted the right to occupy a building at the former Fort Monmouth by the Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority (FMERA).

FPMC, an affiliate of the national Family Promise organization, paid FMERA $1 for a 99-year lease on the 2,800-square-foot building and 2-acre site.

“We’ve been working on getting into this building since 2008,” said FPMC board vice president Mike Meriton. “The great irony of this is that our mission is to help families in need get a permanent home and we didn’t have a permanent home ourselves.”

The nonprofit invested approximately $125,000 to renovate and improve the building for its new mission.

The day center includes a comfortable living room, a fully stocked playroom, locker space where families can store their belongings, two showers, a kitchen, a laundry room and office space for the agency’s three full-time employees.

Those employees are supported by an estimated 1,200 volunteers from area Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faith communities who do everything from making sandwiches to wielding sledgehammers.

“We are a small team but we are a dedicated army,” said FPMC executive director Christine Love. “Everything that you see in this building, we did with blood, sweat and tears.”

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Monmouth County is the fifth wealthiest of New Jersey’s 21 counties, with an annual median family income of over $100,000. Nevertheless, some 200 children in this county become homeless every year.

Anthony and Tatiana Rivera were among that number in 2018, when their mother, Suheil Hooten, found herself without a home following the end of her marriage.

Despite her job at the Goddard School in West Long Branch, Hooten lacked the financial resources to afford an apartment for herself and her children.

“It was very hard as a single mom with two kids to have to give up and say, ‘What am I going to do?’ ” she said. Fortunately, she found Family Promise. “They put a roof over my head. Me and my children had a safe haven. They provided all our meals. That gave me an opportunity to save every penny that I had. It was just amazing. They really provided time for me to do what I needed to do.”

Today, Hooten and her two children have a three-bedroom apartment in Freehold that she was able to afford with the help of FPMC’s savings match program that doubled the money she set aside from her paycheck to cover the cost of a security deposit.

Behind success stories like Hooten’s is a corps of volunteers from area religious congregations who work together to provide shelter, food and a constellation of services that support FPMC families as they tackle the obstacles that stand between them and stability.

“I was homeless as a child, but I was also homeless as an adult,” Love told the gathering Friday. Despite those struggles, she eventually graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in social work, followed by a master’s in business administration. “It doesn’t matter where you stop,” she said. “It matters that you keep going.”