“Hope for the Homeless.”

This is the message City Mission uses to drive its organization. An organization for the homeless, City Mission was established in 1941. It has been continuously serving the southwestern Pennsylvania area for almost eight decades.

According to Dr. and Lieutenant Colonel Sally Mounts, chief development officer for City Mission, there are currently homes being provided to men, women and children through three different shelters at their establishment. There will be an addition to the branches of homeless shelters, which will be known as The Patriot House, for homeless veterans.

“22 veterans commit suicide every day in the United States,” Mounts said. “Our new shelter will have 22 beds for homeless veterans, and they’ll be involved in a six month to one-year program, which facilitates their moving from homelessness to independent living.” 

Mounts said that when people come into the program, they go through an evaluation to identtify any needs, including medical, legal, mental health, housing, income, recovery and religion.

“We evaluate everyone at the beginning and we run them through a six-month program which involves a lot of classes on recovery and alcohol and drug triggers,” Mounts said. “We also do work therapy, so our City Mission residents work in janitorial, the cafeteria, the donations center and our seven hidden treasure stores throughout Pennsylvania. So, they do all of that and they learn job skills.”

After their sixth-month program, Mounts equated the transformation of homelessness to the skills that they acquire before exiting the program.

“We try really hard to provide an effective holding environment for people who are homeless and these ropes that bind them to homelessness are many and varied,” Mounts said.

According to Mounts, there are five overarching ideas that she teaches those at City Mission: housing, employment, income, recovery and spirituality [HEIRS]. 

Mounts said that the idea branched from their original model for the homeless, known as the VA Model, and they created a program for veterans with their original model, as well as programs specifically for veterans.

“We wanted to take our model that worked so well and combine it with the VA Model of Feeling, and the VA Model of Feeling says that veterans in groups heal much more quickly than veterans by themselves,” Mounts said. “Our goal is to take these 22 homeless veterans, put them in this program as well but give them elements of the current program and they would eat in our current shelter, but they would also have elements that are theirs and theirs alone.”

The shelter is a $2.8 million project. So far, $1.8 million has been raised.  

“We’re really looking for donations, however small,” Mounts said.

As a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, Mounts is excited to see the project come to life.

“It feels really wonderful,” Mounts said. “We’ve taken the community rehabilitation efforts helping veterans move from homelessness to independence right to their back doors.”

Mounts’ message for the Patriot House is simple: “They’ve served us, now let’s serve them.”