Homeless people in Boston may receive more comprehensive assistance to help them out of unemployment after the announcement of Pine Street Inn and hopeFound’s partnership.
Pine Street Inn and hopeFound, organizations dedicated to helping Boston’s homeless, offer shelter and resources for people to reenter the workforce. Based in the South End and Jamaica Plain, respectively, they have about 70 years of experience combined.
The merger between the two organizations will be official in March.
The two groups received support from Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who lauded the initiative at the merger announcement on Monday.
“Now homeless men and women in Boston will have better access to the services they need to get off the streets, out of shelters and into permanent housing,” Menino said. “[This brings] us one step closer to ending homelessness here in Boston.”
The combined organization aims to offer a range of other services such as permanent housing, emergency shelter, outreach and substance abuse treatment.
“Having done a merger myself, it takes time, but the advantage they have is that they know each other really well,” said Evelyn Friedman, Boston’s cabinet chief of housing and Department of Neighborhood Development director. “They have some of the same activities and some complementary activities, so that will help.”
Heidi Daniels, vice president of development and external affairs at Pine Street Inn, said the complementary services that Pine Street Inn and hopeFound offered means better services in the future.
While Pine Street Inn specializes in job training, it has no job-placement program. The opposite exists at hopeFound, where there is job placement, but no job training.
“[The merger] puts us in a much stronger position to be able to deliver on the promise of ending homelessness,” Daniels said. “I have a really great deal of respect for the courage and the leadership it took. I think it’s remarkable.”
Stephen Skinner, hopeFound board president, said the organizations made an “initial leap toward ending homelessness.”
“This will help better serve the needs of people we have served for decades and should be our primary concern, with more people getting a place to call home,” Skinner said.
Mary Nee, who will assist hopeFound’s collaboration with Pine Street Inn, also said she was excited about the merger.
“I think when we come together for men and women who are homeless in the city,” Nee said, “they will be able to access more services, better coordinated services and really move [in]to housing much faster than they can now.”
Nee said the common goal was ending homelessness, and this effort was a monumental step towards this.
“Our mission was to end homelessness,” Nee said. “We took a hard look at how we could best do that and that wasn’t about us getting bigger, it was about us cooperating. Because we did it for all the right reasons, it feels so good.”
Pine Street Inn members said they shared the same emotions on the merger.
Barbara Trevisan, communications director for Pine Street Inn, said the organizations will be better geared toward working on their mutual goals.
“The organizations will be able to better serve men and women who are homeless,” Trevisan said. “We are looking forward to a really efficient system that best integrates with each other.”
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