Housing Opportunities and Dayspring Counseling and Women's Center announced today that the two non-profit organizations will be joining forces to allow an even greater reach when it comes to helping those in need within the Valparaiso community.
By coming together and becoming one organization, the two organizations’ mission of ending homelessness and addressing mental health issues is now more accessible than ever before.
"By joining together, we can now essentially help out any client who walks through the door," says Housing Opportunities CEO, Caroline Shook. "This truly does make things easier in terms of fulfilling our goals of helping as many people as possible."
For Housing Opportunities, this provides opportunities to help community members find housing options and helping to build education and self-reliance towards their knowledge of housing options.
What this also means is that Dayspring can also work with these same clients who may need counseling.
"We are basically eliminating extra steps these people may need in seeking help," explains Shook. "We may have someone come through looking for housing solutions and through that we may discover some other issues that Daysprings can step in and help out with through their counseling and employment services.”
“We want to be as beneficial to our clients and our community as possible."
Along with the added benefit of helping clients in need, this merger also provides benefits to both the community and donors in the form of reduced costs.
"By merging together we have combined our two administrative staff together, meaning no additional staff had to be hired," says Shook. "This provides an ability to bring no extra costs to the community and donors while still offering even more benefits than before."
While the merger of two separate organizations may seem like a large amount of planning, this merger was a smooth transition thanks to the mutual level of understanding between the two organizations.
"This all began with a conversation of how we could streamline these services for the benefit of the community," says Shook. “Due to the fact that everyone wanted to have what was best for the community, it was very easy to talk to the board and ensure that this merger was completed in a relatively short amount of time."