North Star Family Services has a website, CLICK HERE. — Brochure, CLICK HERE. — One-sheet on Endowment Campaign, CLICK HERE. For those who want to help there is a wish list, CLICK HERE. There’s a donation page with a secure donation link and a mailing address, CLICK HERE.
Helping Homeless Families – An Interview with Jon Hogue of North Star Family Services – and the Gardner Mayor’s Local Efforts
Gardner Magazine had the honor of speaking with Dr. Jon Hogue, the President & CEO of North Star Family Services, Inc., a Leominster non-profit which helps the homeless every single day. Listen to the interview on any device, CLICK PLAY.
North Star Family Services has been around over 20 years and serves families “that are struggling, low-income, and homeless families with children. Families that don’t have the security of having a home. And if you don’t have a home, you don’t have food security, because you don’t have a fridge.”
Jon Hogue says that the homeless crisis is growing every year because wages aren’t keeping up with costs and rental costs or buying a home have skyrocketed to ridiculous levels. North Star has its shelter in Leominster on Main Street (shown in our graphic). Hogue describes it as a family resource center and we go over all the details.
Under our graphic, we are providing links to the website, a brochure, a wish list, a donation page link, and a one sheet on the 12 month endowment campaign. A donor is willing to match donations up to $750,000. The endowment would be used to help sustain the organization for the future.
Gardner Mayor Michael Nicholson has been working with Jon Hogue to try to get a similar program for the homeless up and running in Gardner.
Gardner Efforts with Mayor Michael Nicholson
Gardner Mayor Nicholson works behind the scenes in order to help many non-profits.. Right now, the Mayor has been talking with Jon Hogue about how to better help the homeless in Gardner. This is what Jon Hogue said, “So, I’ve gotten to know the Mayor over the last couple of years. I’m actually a resident of Gardner myself, so I care about the families all over, including my home city, so I’ve been working with the Mayor about trying to lay some groundwork to try to do some affordable, supportive, subsidized housing in Gardner. And we’re trying to identify the means to do that because there’s a lot that goes onto it, into it rather, you know, you have to have land or a building that’s suitable, you have to have funding to renovate or construct the building, and then you have to have ongoing operational costs that are very hard to come by, so you’ve got to have a mechanism or a strategy for that. So, he and I are having regular conversations around this, and I’m pretty confident that we will have something in the works soon, but like I said here at North Star, for our Journey Home Program that we just finished, it took seven years to get it done. So, this isn’t an overnight solution, but if we start now, the sooner we’ll be done. So, since we finished our Journey Home Program, or housing project, we learned a lot as an agency. We also learned how funding could potentially work, so we’re ahead of the game when we’re looking at trying to do something in Gardner, and, you know, the mayor’s been very supportive of what North Star is doing and would like us to do something in Gardner, so that’s the plan.”