Healthy Families
HEALTHY FAMILIES provides a variety of support for working families facing a crisis. From housing to food to therapy, we help strengthen and stabilize families preventing homelessness and/or the need for state intervention.
About Healthy Families
Healthy Families helps prevent a family crisis from becoming a disaster.
Do You Need Help?
Call or email:
(404) 868-0989
HFreferrals@christiancity.org
Christian City’s Healthy Families program is all about shoring up vulnerable families by connecting with parents to improve their understanding of child development, health, and nutrition, as well as their skills in budgeting, coping with stress, and navigating life’s ups and downs. The key is to reinforce parents’ confidence in their strengths while helping them identify areas where they can improve. Strengthening families provides the safe and stable environment children need to grow up healthy and secure.
We are also here to help working families move beyond a crisis while staying together. Healthy Families provides an array of support when a crisis happens – job loss, illness, a car repair. These life events can nudge families away from self-sufficiency. Healthy Families is here to help families access the things they need – rental assistance, job training, food support – to stay on track.
Denise story
Denise works as a security guard for an hourly wage but it wasn’t enough when the landlord raised the rent. Denise and her four children were evicted from their home. The family was living in their car when she found Christian City. Each morning the kids would wash up in a service station bathroom before school. Denise knew this wasn’t working and wasn’t safe, but she was trying to keep the family together. When she came to Christian City for help she couldn’t imagine a way forward. Our Healthy Families program was created to help families just like Denise’s. The ultimate goal is to keep families intact when they face an emergency or crisis.
Working with Healthy Families a plan was developed to tackle both the immediate and long-term needs of the family.
The three school-age children moved into the Children’s Village temporarily so that they would be safe and have the benefits of being in a home as they continued to go to school. Through one of its many partnerships, Christian City helped Denise and her youngest child get into a nearby hotel while she looked for a more permanent place to stay.
The children lived at Christian City for about three months. During that time, they were in contact with their mother as she continued to work and look for a new home. When she found one, she worked with Healthy Families to get into it and bring her children home.
Through Christian City partners, Denise received help getting into the new townhouse and furnishing it. Today, just a few months later, Denise and her children are back together and flourishing.
