Homelessness can happen to anyone, including families. There are very few spaces in the city that help actively or nearly homeless families. Recent city policies to address homelessness primarily target individuals, but one program is willing to change that.
Family Promise of Greater Wichita is a program that helps families with children overcome homelessness and housing insecurity through prevention, shelter, stabilization and long-term support. The organization works with families through a relationship-driven approach, walking alongside them to help regain housing and rebuild stability.
Stephenie Higgins knows what it’s like to walk in the shoes of families working through the programs at Family Promise, as she has been there, too.
Higgins was referred to the organization in 2017 after she went to St. Anthony’s family shelter.
“(Family Promise has) really shaped my life and made me who I am,” Higgins said. “They have changed my whole worldview, honestly. I feel like a completely different person.”
Higgins is now the council chair of the Family Promise Advisory Council and serves as an at-large member for its board, a testament to how the organization changed her life.
Three core programs make up Family Promise’s network.
Emergency intervention, shelter and stabilization
“Our flagship program, what most people know about Family Promise, is a shelter program,” Beth Schafers, the director of development and community engagement, said. “We have a unique shelter model where we actually partner with community faith congregations to open their doors and welcome families into their space overnight so that our families have a safe place to be, have community support every night of the year.”
Schafers says those families are invited to share a meal with the hosting congregation, providing a safe space to relax and break bread together.
“We kind of decided it looked like a good program, so we took a leap of faith because we didn’t really know what all was involved with hosting families,” Glover said. “And I just said, ‘Well, let’s go ahead and do it.’”
West Heights has now hosted families for seven years. As a coordinator, Glover said one of his favorite parts about volunteering with the organization is the face-to-face interaction with the families.
“There’s always something that’s special,” Glover said. “It can be difficult at times, but for the most part, it’s a fulfilling aspect of that host week.”
According to Schafers, when it comes to homelessness, families are often left out of the conversation because they double up with other families, sleep on couches, in cars or in motels.
“They are not going to be what you see when you drive around downtown,” Schafers said. “There are different elements of that population that some are more visible than others and families often, unfortunately, are hidden from view.”
Just last year, Family Promise served a total of 343 families, including 933 children.
In their Homelessness Prevention program, they helped 202 families avoid homelessness.
With their Crisis Intervention Program, 37 families were able to exit homelessness, and with the help of their stabilization program, 72% of families stay in touch with the organization, and 92% of those families remain stably housed.
Family Promise also focuses on relational poverty – meaning a lack of a support system. Schafers said that Family Promise works to relieve that by building a network of community and support for families experiencing homelessness.
Another aspect of Family Promise’s shelter programs, Schafers says, is providing transitional housing.
“We have a couple of duplexes in the community where once a family has their own transportation, has a job and just needs that next step up before they’re ready to take on a lease somewhere or find a place to live, we can offer some support at a static site location,” Schafers said. “We’re still doing regular case management on a weekly basis, still working on goal setting with that family that they’ve taken that next step towards independence before they move on on their own.”
Schafers explained that the shelter programs are one entry point into Family Promise – the other is its emergency services program.
“It really is homelessness prevention,” Schafers said.
Through its emergency services program, Family Promise works with families who are at risk of losing their homes and experiencing housing insecurity.
“There’s lots of statistics about how close most of us are, like one paycheck away from absolute disaster,” Schafers said.
They help families get over the hump by providing rental assistance. In 2024, Family Promise gave over $139,000. But the need is much greater than the resources the organization can provide.
The organization opens up its application for rental assistance for four hours a month, allowing families to apply. In July, Family Promise had 121 applicants. Schafers says that the organization can only help about 20 families a month.
“ So that’s a huge gap between where the need is and where we actually can step in,” Schafers said. “ And we still get phone calls every day and people looking for support that missed the application window, and we just have to point them to the next one, which is hard.”
Family Promise also has its stabilization program. These families usually come from their emergency and shelter initiatives, Schafers said.
“We can normally ensure that the family is really on their feet (and) has the support they need,” Schafers said. “Because we don’t want just to write a check for rent and then a family has something pop back up in a couple of months, and then they’re right back where they started.”
How families fall into homelessness varies. The breadwinner losing their job, medical debt piling up and sudden rent increases push families into housing insecurity. Some find relief by doubling up with others, congesting a single household with several family members.
That doubling up often goes formally uncounted. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of homelessness, which involves an individual living in a place not meant for human habitation, does not include multiple families living in one residence.
“Those are the numbers that you’ll see with anything that’s related at all to federal funding,” Schafers said. “We really believe in the work that’s being done under that definition, but we also believe that there’s this population that gets missed.”
As another example, Schafers pointed out that under the HUD definition, those who are sleeping on someone’s couch or are sleeping in a motel would not be considered homeless because they are technically sheltered.
“There are some nuances to those things,” Schafers said. “But, kind of those general buckets where we see families getting missed is in those spaces. So the way we identify the kind of missing population is through the McKinney-Vento Act.”
Under McKinney-Vento, a federal education initiative to keep homeless students in school, homeless students and their families who lack fixed, regular and nighttime residence can be included in homelessness relief.
“(McKinney-Vento) helps supply every public school district with funding and support to make sure that kids do not have their educational experience disrupted,” Schafers said. “It offers some of that support to make sure that kids who are navigating really difficult circumstances and may not have a lot of consistency in their life.
“If their family is moving from place to place or couch surfing, they would still have some consistency with their educational support, would still be able to be with their friends, with their same teachers, have counselors that know what’s going on and can try to support that family well.”
USD 259, Wichita’s school district, identified 1,965 students currently enrolled in McKinney-Vento. In comparison, Sedgwick County’s point-in-time survey for HUD only counted 90 children experiencing homelessness.
Eleven churches, dozens of volunteers and 400 families
Eleven churches in the Wichita metro serve as host congregations. They take turns taking in families four times a year.
Glover, with West Heights United Methodist, said that interacting with families was a step outside of his comfort zone.
“It’s just not something I was used to doing,” Glover said. “But most of the families are very gracious and humble and grateful for being on this journey…so interacting with them is generally very easy and a nice experience.”
When it comes to hosting families for the week, each host congregation has a different way of setting up for those coming in.
Glover says his church has about 30 to 40 volunteers who sign up to help for the week.
“I’ve got a team of five other coordinators that focus on specific areas,” Glover said. “I’ve got two people that are focused on food and meals, I have a guy who’s focused on transportation… got one that focuses on the – what we call – ‘time with the families,’” referring to the free hours families have between dinner and bedtime.
During the week, families staying with Family Promise can spend the day at the Day House for recreation or classes such as financial literacy.
“ We usually have younger kids in the program, but funnily enough, over the last several months, we’ve had several waves of families that had a lot of teenagers,” Schafers said. “In general, we have kids kind of running around doing different things. Parents are responsible for keeping their kids within sight and sound of them while they’re there.”
Schafers said that when there are parents at the day house, they are working on their goals to achieve stability, like building their resume and practicing job interviews.
Family Promise also works with case managers from other organizations within Sedgwick County’s continuum of care to connect families with a network of support.
“ Working with other people at other organizations or government agencies, working with families, to make sure they have their Section 8 vouchers lined up and all of those things in place, going with them to the DCF (Department of Children and Families) office to advocate and be an extra support,” Schafers said.
An ‘amazing, holistic approach’ to family homelessness
Higgins, the Family Promise graduate and current at-large board member, serves as a recruiter for Family Promise, helping to attract different congregations to join the organization’s network of churches.
Higgins helped create and became chair of the Graduate Advisory Council this year to help the graduates of Family Promise have a voice.
“ Sometimes the board would like more of an inside view from a graduate standpoint,” Higgins said. “ So that’s gonna be really vital in putting together different programs or just kind of getting a little bit of insight into how the graduates face things.”
Higgins said that as a graduate, she has never seen an organization stick around long-term like Family Promise has.
“Like every year for Christmas, they still help with Christmas presents for the kids,” Higgins said. “They really hold on to you long term, and it’s all up to the graduate if the graduate wants to continue communicating with people there, then they do; if not, that’s fine. They’re just an amazing, holistic approach to a huge problem.”
Family Promise’s approach is important because homeless families face unique hurdles. Sometimes, Schafers says, it’s easier for a single person to navigate the system versus a family.
“Transportation, for instance,” Schafers said. “If you’re working with a single individual person, you may be able to navigate the Wichita transit system and make things happen for that person. If I have a single mom with five kids, I’m not going to put them on the Wichita bus line because it would be a nightmare to navigate with your kids.”
Another difference between working with individuals and families is finding appropriate housing.
“You’re looking for larger units,” Schafers said. “You’ve got kids in the picture, so you’re looking at ‘how safe is this neighborhood for my children to be in?’ Whereas, an adult may or may not be able to move into that location with a little less concern.”
Families also need to navigate employment and financial literacy with more than just one person in mind. Job opportunities may be limited to when children need an adult at home.
“Whether it’s a two-parent household or a single-parent household, hours of employment can be really hard to navigate as a single parent,” Schafers said. Childcare is yet another barrier. “You’re not only looking for a job and looking for a car and looking for a larger home, but you’re also trying to figure out how to find affordable childcare. There’s just extra layers.”
Leaning into prevention
On June 13, Family Promise announced that it is expanding its services and has received grants from the Stand Together Foundation and the Chase Koch Foundation to expand partnerships with other community organizations, establish positive relationships with landlords and create other support services.
“We’re working to finalize our plans on what that looks like, but really reaching into more of our prevention work and our stabilization work,” Schafers said.
With the expansion, Schafers said that Family Promise is trying to focus more on prevention and to keep families housed by alleviating some of the burden that families face, like a lack of affordable housing.
“So, continuing to pour into families who have done the hard work of overcoming housing insecurity and are in housing now,” Schafers said. “How can we continue to invest in those families through continued support, through continued case management, goal setting, educational opportunities? … We offer some additional options for our families that may include some community building and some support, which is really what’s key for us.”
Jacinda Hall is a recent Wichita State University graduate and the summer 2025 intern with the Wichita Journalism Collaborative
This article was provided through the Wichita Journalism Collaborative, a partnership of 10 media and community partners, including KMUW.
