Restoring Hope

Following a disaster, many of those most affected by its impact can feel powerless and alone. As the recovery process continues, many people begin to lack the spiritual and emotional well-being, as well as the resources, to get themselves to a place of recovery. Attack Poverty, through our Disaster Recovery Teams, provides an array of services to families and individuals who do not have the financial means to recover after a disaster. We are committed to journeying with residents affected by Hurricane Harvey who need to fill a financial gap in order to get their lives back. While we support the recovery of a house to be a safe and secure place to call home, we also guide individuals and families through the process in order to build relationships, trust and afuture. We call this restoring hope.
We understand the connections between a decent place to live, a living wage job, spiritual health, clean water, quality education, child care, healthy families, basic and financial literacy, transportation and access to health care for sustainability.Because of this, we offer our holistic recovery model that includes building the resiliency of the families we work with for life and preparedness for the next disaster. Our goal is to guide individuals through recovery from this current disaster, equipping them with the knowledge and confidence needed in order to manage their personal recovery. We foster an environment to awaken potential and provoke transformation.
Our mission at Attack Poverty is to strengthen under-resourced communities through spiritual growth, education, revitalization and basic needs. We use our hyper-local holistic community development model and carry that philosophy into our disaster recovery work to restore wholeness to people and communities. As the capacity of someone grows, the ability to make choices and transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes becomes stronger. We provide not only material resources, but education, too. We want to improve an individual’s, a family’s and a community’s capacity to absorb and recover quickly from the shocks and stresses, leading them toward sustainability. We provide a hand up not just a hand out.
Attack Poverty is grateful for the significant grant we recently received from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Hurricane Harvey Recovery Fund. This grant will allow us to build our internal capacity in order to spread our recovery model even further to support those most affected by Hurricane Harvey. We are currently working to move from supporting repair and rebuild of 10 homes per month to an ultimate goal of completing 50 homes per month. We will also expand our work beyond where we are now, in Fort Bend County, Texas and the Northside neighborhood in Houston. Thanks to our success in these areas, we have been asked to take our holistic recovery model to surrounding counties and neighborhoods where disaster recovery is still just in the beginning stages.
By funding an increase in our capacity through the Hurricane Harvey Recovery Fund, the CDP board has shown that they, too, have the same focus as we do. They want to do more than just repair or rebuild homes. They also want to restore hope to those who were affected and leave these families and communities more resilient for the future.