When Barbara Mott and her husband stayed overnight with three homeless families at Grace Lutheran Church, she got a new appreciation for what the families were going through. It was nice at Grace Lutheran, said Mott, and the guests — 14 people in three families — were very gracious. “But I like to go home, and to cook in my own kitchen and to sleep in my own bed,” said Mott. Mott coordinated volunteers from St. Nicholas Parish in Evanston, which cooperated with Grace Lutheran in Family Promise, an interfaith program in which religious congregations take turns providing shelter and meals to homeless families with children. So far, 14 religious congregations, including St. Nicholas and St. Francis Xavier Parish in Wilmette, are working together. Eleven them are providing space and volunteers; three, like St. Nicholas, are supporting other host congregations. Family Promise started in the Chicago area this spring, although it has been active in other parts of the United States for about 20 years. The board chairman, Brek Peterson, got it off the ground here after serving as a volunteer for Family Promise in Massachusetts. It just makes sense “It’s a little hard to describe until you do it the first time,” said Mott. “But then you do it, and it just makes so much sense.” It works like this: a group of churches or other religious congregations offer space in their buildings — usually classrooms —for a week at a time. Homeless families are transported to the site each evening by van; volunteers from the parish then cook and eat with them, spend the evening helping with homework or playing games, spend the night and send them off with breakfast and lunch for the next day. The van takes them back to the Family Promise day center, located in Evanston, where there are showers and laundry facilities. Children get picked up for school from the day center and adults go to work, or use the facilities there to look for jobs. Everyone returns to the day center in late afternoon and they are taken back to the church for the night. Each week, they change churches. Father William Sheridan, pastor at St. Francis Xavier, said his parish hosted for two weeks over the summer because the school rooms are in use during the school year. “It’s very simple in terms of taking care of the homeless,” Sheridan said. “And it’s in line with what our faith asks us to do.” Questions were raised about the advisability of housing homeless people on the church grounds, Sheridan said, but they were resolved fairly easily. Peterson, who has been recruiting churches and other congregations for years, has heard all the questions. Usually, once people understand the program, they are very welcoming, he said. Adult guests must have background checks before they are accepted. They must have children under 18. And they must be homeless — which can mean living in a shelter, in a car or doubling up with relatives and friends. Usually, each family sleeps in its own room, on rollaway beds supplied (and moved from church to church) by Family Promise. School buses pick children up at the day center to make it easier for school districts to know where the children are. Keep kids in school “It’s very important to keep the children in the same schools if at all possible,” Peterson said. Federal law requires school districts to provide transportation to homeless children if at all practical, but homeless families often lead a nomadic existence, moving from shelter to shelter or one relative’s home to another. “We didn’t miss a single day this spring,” Peterson said. Each week, the families usually move to a new religious congregation, although St. Francis Xavier in Wilmette hosted for two weeks straight. “Our congregations have space that is not used very much during the week,” Peterson said. “We are able to give families privacy and house them together.” Most of the church facilities have kitchens to make dinner. Over the course of the week, each congregation provides 35-40 volunteers: two each for the dinner shift, evening shift and overnight shift each night As of the beginning of August, Family Promise Chicago North Shore had helped five families, and it was too soon to know what an average stay would be, Peterson said. Nationally, the average stay for a family is 60 days, then Family Promise follows up for about six months to make sure the housing plan is working out. Because the congregations provide space, food and volunteers, Family Promise Chicago North Shore is able to operate on a shoestring budget of about $120,000 a year, said Peterson. His hope is that in addition to helping homeless families, having Family Promise in their churches will help parishioners understand the need for affordable housing and that homeless people are not so different from them. “You’re meeting people who might have worked at an insurance company for 13 years,” Mott said. “It’s really ‘There but for the grace of God …’” It also is one of the few direct service programs that welcomes families as volunteers, she said. “A lot of places, they don’t want kids until they are a certain age,” Peterson said. “We encourage volunteers to bring their kids, because it’s a more normal family environment.”