That’s Karen Olson, founder and national president of homelessness-fighting Family Promise, while visiting West Seattle to support and encourage the local affiliate’s efforts to reopen its shelter program. Almost six months after they announced they had to put the shelter on hiatus until they could raise enough money to reopen (here’s our August 2010 story), they’re more than halfway there, and Olson told the local board during her visit that she has confidence “they can do this!”

WSB talked with Olson last night, just before she was the guest of honor at an Alki reception for Family Promise of Seattle supporters (we last updated their campaign with this Christmas Day story). She founded the organization in New Jersey almost 25 years ago, and says other chapters have gone through rocky times, but the West Seattle-based group has a lot going for it – including the congregations that are “eager to begin again.” Instead of having one fixed-location shelter, Family Promise offers homeless families a place to sleep hosted by a rotating group of congregations, each of which commits to shelter and feed a family an average of once per quarter. Olson describes it as an “interfaith hospitality network.”

The national office is relatively small and helps coach and mobilize local affiliates, but does not raise money for their operations, and that’s why it can’t “bail out” groups like this one. Instead, it helps empower them to “identify people passionate about homelessness,” and the Family Promise mission – “helping homeless families achieve sustainable independence.” Right now there are 162 affiliated organizations nationwide, in 41 states; in our state, the only other one is in Spokane, and Olson was visiting them too while out west.

Eighty percent of the homeless families helped by Family Promise manage to find housing within 8 weeks, Olson says, calling that a “remarkable” success rate, with the “interfaith network” usually resulting in hundreds of volunteers being involved in each community – a “cost-effective (way to) mobilize existing resources” that “helps to heal the hurt of homelessness.”

To keep them going till they are helping families directly again, Olson says she counseled the local board to keep building its ranks with “people who can offer specific talents,” and to “keep remembering the families they served in the past, and the families with no place to turn” – there are no other organizations in the area that allow homeless families to stay together while they work to get back on their feet.

“They need the community to respond, and to help,” Olson added. You can do that by donating – here’s how.