Friendship Home of Lincoln

Friendship Home’s mission exists to support, shelter and advocate for survivors of domestic violence and their children.

It is Friendship Home's vision that someday the need for our services will cease to exist, that dome

Goal One: We are launching a major gifts campaign to address an anticipated $1.6M funding gap in 2023-26.

Goal Two: FH has contracted with Inclusive Communities to facilitate a year-long process to create an organizational culture where everyone can learn, communicate and work in collaboration and mutual respect.

Goal Three: Improve our community’s systemic response to domestic violence and honor violence within Middle Eastern Immigrant Communities and expand Friendship Home’s services to victims from this population.

Over the last 18 months, Friendship Home has supported three emerging leaders at Friendship Home (through tuition and paid time) in participating in Leadership Lincoln, a nine-month leadership training program. Two have completed the training and one began participation in September 2021.

The pandemic galvanized Friendship Home staff and Board in maintaining our lifesaving and life-changing services, underscoring just what we can accomplish in any crisis with teamwork, creativity, tenacity, and the support of our community. We are proud that we protected the well-being of our staff by providing them with special COVID-related leave for illness and childcare (on top of FFCRA leave banks), equipped them to work from home, and took extra care to respond to their concerns and maintain communication and camaraderie. We worked with our federal and local experts to create policies and procedures which protected the health of the survivors we serve and our staff. We regularly updated them to respond to changing conditions and evolving best practices. We networked intentionally to understand how other shelter providers were adapting. While our communal shelter was closed for about nine months, we substituted suite motels to fill the shelter gap. Our scattered-site single-family shelters and transitional housing units proved to be quite effective in the pandemic. We equipped them with Wi-Fi, tablets, and desks to facilitate working or learning from home. While we could not provide face-to-face services in 2020, our advocates and case managers worked tirelessly to provide virtual or phone services, individualized to meet the client’s needs, and to break the isolation many clients were experiencing. We leveraged every special COVID funding opportunity that came our way—purchasing equipment, improving our facilities, and upgrading software. Board and staff created a solidarity statement to embrace the BLM movement. We focused monthly staff meetings on creating space for all staff and survivors and their lived experiences within our work. Ultimately, FH engaged the expertise of Inclusive Communities in a year-long process to create an organizational culture where everyone can learn, communicate, work in collaboration and mutual respect.