Family Gateway

The mission of Family Gateway is to provide stability and life-changing supportive services to families with children experiencing homelessness. We empower families to transform their lives and achieve self-sufficiency. We engage children in opportunities to learn and grow so they can create a new family legacy. We act with respect and compassion in all that we do.

At Family Gateway, we work to empower families to transform their lives and achieve self-sufficiency

Goal One: We will continue scaling our Assessment & Diversion practice, which is the first of its kind in our community, to keep more families stabilized without emergency shelter whenever possible.

Goal Two: We have implemented a Vocational Case Management program to help families increase their income and secure positive housing.

Goal Three: We are actively involved in our community & homeless response system to understand/challenge the intersection of family homelessness w/ criminal justice, affordable housing, education, & racial equity

A part of our strategic plan is to accelerate and scale our pivotal role in the homeless response system in coordination with our Continuum of Care (CoC) and national strategies. This includes having the directors on our leadership team represent Family Gateway in various workgroups at the CoC level and in numerous partnerships with other local agencies. National training is also available to all team members through the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

We faced many new challenges last year due to COVID-19, but we never closed our doors. From March to early September, our emergency shelter was the only one in Dallas accepting new families (except for domestic violence shelters). At the onset of COVID-19 in March of 2020, best practices from the CDC were quickly implemented, and our President & CEO was on daily calls with the City of Dallas and other shelter leaders for collaboration and creative problem solving. Our dormitory-style shelter with shared bathrooms and dining space is not an ideal environment to prevent the spread of germs. So, to help manage disease spread and system capacity restraints, we established a second shelter location (Shelter II) at a hotel where families had their own bathrooms and kitchenettes. Working families were placed at Shelter II since they come and go more frequently. As a result of our successful management of Shelter II, we were selected to partner with the City of Dallas in 2021 to operate a second family shelter at a former Candlewood Suites property in Far North Dallas. This meant an increase in our staffing and security to ensure the children and families at both locations have the support they need to regain stability and self-sufficiency. We will continue operating this second shelter location in Far North Dallas after the pandemic is behind us. We are also in a new partnership with The Salvation Army to increase the number of shelter beds for families with children in our community. Currently, the volume of families in need of shelter exceeds the capacity of our system; our shelter locations and space at The Salvation Army are full, and we are supporting approximately 40 families in "overflow" hotel space until a shelter room becomes available, so they do not have to return to sleeping in their cars. We will continue to scale and improve our programs to meet the increased need in our community and to adapt to our dynamic environment.