The Gift Of A Helping Hand Charitable Trust

Contact: Program Director

17148 Waltham, Detroit, MI 48205

Website: http://www.tgoahhct.org

E-mail: tgoahh@hotmail.com

Tax ID: #38-3640111

Shelter Mission

The Gift Of A Helping Hand Emergency Shelter will eliminate homelessness and domestic violence one shelter at a time. We will provide the homeless with the valuable resources, assistances, support groups and opportunities needed to help them to become self-sufficient, self-reliant and living productive and abusive free lifestyle.

Advocacy Philosophy

Domestic violence against women must stop. Let us end the violence, afford battered women and help safeguard them against future abuse, mandate restitution and offer resources for independent, violence-free living.

The search for freedom from domestic violence is often a long and arduous process and it cannot occur until battering and terrorism cease. Even then, it is obstructed unless the battered woman can achieve autonomy and self-determination. Please help us continue our fight against domestic violence against women. With your support we can continue fight against domestic violence against women.

The Gift Of A Helping Hand Emergency Shelter will provide housing for the 60% of homeless single mothers with children and the 39% of homeless single mothers with children leaving out of domestic violence situations in southeastern Michigan.

There is a greater demand now more than ever to provide housing for the homeless constituency because these individuals needs a mailing address in order to be able to apply for a job, job training, educational training and other human services assistance that will help them to become self-sufficient and self-reliant.

While making available housing for the homeless constituency and giving them the opportunity to have access to a telephone, mailing address, day-care services and job referral opportunities will help us toward our goal of eliminating homelessness in southeastern Michigan, while in the long-term making our project and the issues of homelessness we are addressing a success.

Our program promotes diversity and economic self-sufficiency through workforce initiatives. The program will provide resources for our clients to domestic violence support groups, classes and other valuable human services programs. The program will make available outreach programs for the children residing in the shelter such as after school programs and activities.

Nearly 1 million people are homeless on any given night. Most homeless families who received needed services like substance abuse treatment, education and job training, stop being homeless. Homelessness is a condition that we have the power to end. Nevertheless, on any given night in metropolitan Detroit, Michigan 50,000 individuals and families are homeless. Sixty-percent of the homeless constituency are single mothers with children and twenty-one percent of adults employed in the United States are victims of domestic violence's (65% female, 35% male).
Domestic violence in the single greatest cause to injury to women ages 15 to 44 in the United States. In metropolitan Detroit, Michigan 0.2 percent of the cases are domestic violence's and 0.4% of the cases are chronic.

However, only 1,995 emergency shelter beds exist to serve this population and many individuals and families are turn away every night because the homeless shelter facilities are fill to their capacity. Twenty-three percent of shelter guest are a child who enter the shelter with their families in metropolitan Detroit, Michigan and other Wayne counties. So we seek your support in helping us to complete The Gift Of A Helping Hand Emergency Shelter, so we can provide housing for the homeless single mothers with children.

Sincerely,

Cathy P. Russell

An entire generation of youth in southern Africa is in crisis. In Swaziland alone, a country smaller than New Jersey and with a total population of one million people, UNICEF estimates there will be 120,000 orphaned children by 2010 – representing 22% of all children in Swaziland.

Kuluma is a project of YouthAssets’ whose mission is to empower youth in southern Africa, particularly those heading households, by engaging them with information and communication technologies to connect them to the knowledge they need to broaden their choices for the future. With this urgent need to support orphans, traditionally strong communities are being strained beyond capacity. Although their parents have died, youth are encouraged to stay on their homestead to continue to claim their house and land – a very valuable asset for food production and shelter. However, they remain isolated from support networks and resources without an adult caretaker and are responsible for raising their brothers and sisters on their own. A mechanism is needed to reduce their isolation and connect them to the resources they need.

Kuluma proposes to take advantage of the mobile phone network in Swaziland, our pilot country, to connect youth who are heading households and give them a voice.  Connecting small groups of youth via teleconferences, youth will have the opportunity to tell their story and give and receive support from their peers. Each group will receive a collective fund to manage and to decide collaboratively how to use the money (distribute the funds evenly, use it as capital to start small businesses, or any other idea) to support themselves sustainably and effectively. YouthAssets will learn from the youth themselves, and will use this knowledge to develop scalable strategies to reach more of the 10,000 orphan headed-households within Swaziland.

Please select Kuluma for USAID's Development 2.0 Challenge and help YouthAssets to support youth headed-households in Africa. Thank you.

Economic growth, good governance, better community health—Souktel believes that all of these goals depend on something simple: Jobs and the income they bring. A poor family’s best hope for survival (and a brighter future) hinges on its ability to earn and save money. But in most USAID countries, labor markets are in chaos—not because there’s a lack of jobs, but because there are no good information networks to help job-seekers and employers find each other: Web access is low, public/private resources are few, and infrastructure is poor. As a result, job-searching is expensive, time-consuming, and risky.

But a huge number of low-income communities have basic cell phone access, even in rural areas. Souktel leverages this technology to bridge job information gaps in emerging markets—by creating a mobile “job matching” application that helps reduce unemployment and boost local growth.

Our solution is simple: From any phone, job-seekers create SMS "mini-CVs" that include basic data on their skills, location, etc. These are then sent by mobile to our central database--which hundreds of employers search daily, via web or phone. From their side, employers create similar “mini job ads” and post them on the same database—so that job-seekers can search these jobs from their own phones. The database also matches job-seekers/employers who have similar profiles, sending them SMS alerts with each other’s data.

By creating an interactive, accessible platform that ‘levels the playing field’ of access to job market information, Souktel narrows digital divides & breaks cycles of poverty and unemployment. We impact communities (especially young women) on a social level by empowering them to discover that they have more choices and resources than ever before. We impact them economically by providing better information which lets more people find jobs/staff; more ‘job-matching’ leads to more income for families, more productivity for businesses, and more growth for communities.