One local nonprofit hopes to put itself out of business.
“We are developing a social enterprise called Children?s Choice,” said Dr. Pamela Talabis, executive director of Baltimore?s Dayspring Programs Inc., a $2.5 million-a-year, nonprofit provider of subsidized transitional and permanent housing to substance abuse-challenged families in the city.
“We offer job training in the 90-hour child care certification program,” Talabis said, noting that certification will qualify Dayspring Program housing clients to teach Head Start and other child care programs.
The new venture, Talabis said, will be either a for-profit or a nonprofit placement service, hopefully supplying the city?s 13 other Head Start delegate agencies with qualified child care providers ? and further break the generational cycle of homelessness and substance abuse of at-risk area homeless families.
There are 3,000 students enrolled in Head Start in Baltimore City, and an estimated homeless population of 3,500.
“We like to move people on, so that they don?t need our program anymore,” Talabis said, allowing that a placement service also would add another revenue stream to a balance sheet already top-heavy with public funding. She added that Dayspring Programs is a Standards of Excellence awardee of the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations.
But for now, the 10-year-old, 36-employee group?s funding primarily subsidizes 18 recovering families at the Collington Square Nonprofit Association?s apartment building on Collington Avenue; 63 families in permanent housing, mostly in rented row houses on the city?s east side; and six Head Start classrooms, serving 102 children per year.
“I got my life back,” said Sandra Moses, an East Baltimore resident and former heroin addict who graduated from transitional housing into permanent housing, and then an in-house job. “Their program is awesome for people who really want to change their lives.”
Dayspring Programs requires its recovering ? or recovered ? case-managed participants to undergo regular urinalysisto check for drug use and to attend support groups.
Only homeless mothers 18 or older are accepted into the 18-month transitional program, but the permanent program accepts graduates of the transitional program and other homeless, recovered addicts who are six months clean.
More information
» Dayspring Programs Inc.
1200 N. Collington Ave., Baltimore
410-563-3459
www.dayspringbaltimore.com
