Church groups engage the Rescue Mission by volunteering, holding food drives, making financial donations, praying, mentoring addiction recovery graduates, providing scholarships for clients to attend spiritual retreats, and more. A few have offered use of their facilities for program graduations. Some go out of their way to welcome our homeless clients to their worship services or Celebrate Recovery groups. Program graduates have become members of several of these churches, which helps secure stability in the community as well as promote spiritual growth. We greatly appreciate the partnership of local churches both in serving our clients and helping them establish meaningful and productive lives in the community.
The Tacoma Rescue Mission increased its service capacity in 2011 with the newly constructed Adams Street Family Campus. This beautiful facility provides 36 units of emergency shelter and transitional housing for unaccompanied women and families with children. The Downtown Campus has seventy beds for unaccompanied men. Both shelters provide extra cots during inclement weather for clients who need a place to stay when shelters are full.
The Rescue Mission provides affordable housing for low income clients and offers transitional housing where people can live as they are moving from homelessness to self-sufficiency. Programming includes case management, adult basic education, and life skills classes.
The Rescue Mission is able to offer these programs and services because it is not acting alone, but is a conduit funneling the compassion of our community for the homeless. As CEO, David Curry, states, “Our goal is to be a place of hope for those who come into our doors. Over the years, we have developed many great and important programs to serve the homeless and help our clients build a better life. However, systems and programs aren’t the heart of our team, people are. The people we serve are often at the most difficult and challenging time of their lives. ‘Helping everyone become their best through the love of Christ,’ is more than just words, it is our guiding principle.”
