Phone: 309.828.7356
www.hshministries.org
[email protected]
Welcome to Home Sweet Home Ministries’ volunteer team. Volunteers have played, and will continue to play, an important and valuable role in our ministry to the poor and homeless of Central Illinois. Residents, staff and the community benefit from the work of individuals like you who freely share their talents, time and resources. We also know that as a volunteer you too will be rewarded.
This handbook is directed to volunteers who are willing to devote a portion of their time to Home Sweet Home Ministries. We want to make sure you are an informed volunteer so that you can get the most out of your volunteer experience. Whether you plan on volunteering one hour a week, one day a week or daily, your efforts make a difference in lives of the poor and homeless.
Thank you for choosing Home Sweet Home as a place to volunteer. We look forward to working with you!
God Bless,
Teresa Lindsey, Volunteer Coordinator
WHO WE ARE
PHILOSOPHY
HOPE FOR ALL WHO ENTER is a phrase that our founder, Billy Shelper, placed in the windows of our earliest locations. It is a phrase that continues to resonate with us today. Hope is of significant importance in all of our lives. Without hope, we feel resigned, relegated, abandoned, and defeated. With hope, regardless of our current circumstances, we feel motivated, energized, optimistic, and ambitious. So everything we do, every decision we make regarding our services and relationships with people in the community, is guided by hope. Hope for all who enter means that each person (the people we serve, our staff members, our volunteers, and our donors) is offered the chance to experience a renewal of hope through their interactions and involvement at Home Sweet Home Ministries. Rather than think in traditional terms running a “charity” that meets people’s needs, we think in terms of offering “restoration.” When we say restoration, we mean restoration of broken relationships, restoration of health & mental health, restoration of full functioning, restoration of identity of who we are each created to be. The situations people experience vary widely, so our work with them varies to reflect those specific sets of circumstances.
“The honest seeking of hope frees [us] to approach others with high regard and limitless expectations as they face and craft responses to their own futures.” –The Wealth of the Poor, pg. 248.
We are:
Committed to God and Man. Jesus is very clear about the greatest commandments to love God and love our neighbors, so we are very clear in our commitment to demonstrate this in our work and our lives.
Here to work WITH our clients. We believe that through the development of healthy, reciprocal relationships we are best able to serve the homeless and hurting in our community. Ensuring we demonstrate respect for, and affirm the dignity of, those we serve is core to how we work with those who come to us for assistance.
Committed to Excellence. We believe that our Christian testimony is mirrored in the quality of all we do. There can be no higher challenge than found in I Corinthians 10:31: "Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." A commitment to excellence permeates all our actions and decisions.
Committed to Each Other. We are all part of Christ’s body and have to remember that our specific sense of purpose is only part of the whole. By committing to sharing in our efforts with each other, we function as Christ’s body is supposed to – in coordination and complementary to each other.
Committed to Integrity. We believe that our calling commits us to conduct our lives and our business in a manner that applies only the highest standards of ethics and legality.