Local organization assists families with pets experiencing homelessness

Family Promise is an organization assisting families experiencing homelessness. They provide the resources, time, and love for families to stabilize after becoming homeless.

Their Emergency Shelter Program provides shelter, food, and compassion through staff and a loving community of volunteers. They provide daycare assistance, school, in-house play spaces, and nearby Boys & Girls Clubs activities. They maintain a sense of normal family life that kids crave.

One of the organization’s differentiating features is that it helps people who have family pets. The pets receive their own food and shelter right alongside their human family. Without such a service, families would either live in their car to keep their pet or surrender it to an animal shelter.

We spoke with Ted Taylor, CEO of Family Promise, and we were also joined by Snowball, Family Promise’s therapy cat, for the latest edition of Ted’s Tails!

Snowball is a therapy cat and has been with the shelter for at least 14 years. He found the shelter and was a unique cat from the start, according to Taylor. He would attract the children in the shelter.

“We’re a shelter for families here in the valley, but we’re a very different kind of shelter. We shelter in congregations, so churches and synagogues all over this valley shelter out families,” Taylor said.

Family Promise is different than a lot of shelters in the sense that they act as a work program.

“We’re a work program in the shelter system, which means that our goal is to get our families back employed and back into their own sustainable housing. We work really hard with families to navigate the work situation, to get basic service underneath them, and then get them into housing again,” Taylor said.

There’s a relatively low percentage of families that come to the shelter with pets, but families with pets are always welcome in the shelter due to the well-built pet program.