MERCY CENTER TRANSITIONAL LIVING HOME
We are currently in the program development and fund raising stage to open the Mercy Center Transitional Living Home. Our goal is to open by year-end 2008. The vision of Mercy Center Transitional Living Home is to develop a secure environment where single mothers, who are significantly struggling to care for themselves and their children, can gain balance in life and find positive direction forward. Our goal is to help these women come to terms with the circumstances of their lives in a group situation, and help them begin to re-envision themselves as God sees them, with the help of our staff, case workers, professional counselors, mentors and lay ministers. We believe that only with God’s assistance can these women escape the bondage of the sometimes negative cultural forces that has gripped many of them and whereby they have been exploited and minimized.
Our 12-36 month program will also provide professional counseling, tutoring and education toward a state certified high-school GED and college. We will also teach basic life skills and provide guidance ,job search and interviewing skills, basic budgeting, how to plan for more than a week at a time, and preparation skills for life outside the Mercy Center. At the end of this program our goal is to watch women graduate, who have become self-sustaining adults, capable to care for their themselves and their children, and who are rooted in a new vision of themselves as loved and redeemed in Jesus Christ.
Mercy Center is also committed to break the generational inheritance of violence and ignorance. This is essential to understanding why we have targeted single mothers. We are committed to helping single mothers have essential life skills, not only for their own sakes, but so that their children will flourish in a positive environment. Consequently, this program includes special focus and programming for children as well as teaching their mothers about childhood nurturing and development.