The SOS Humanitarian Foundation

Cheryl Carter is a 30-year successful results oriented nonprofit administrator. In 2016, a volunteer experience working in a homeless shelter changed her career trajectory and catapulted her into the field of homelessness. After she witnessed firsthand the ineffective strategies and the lack of long-term solutions that allowed clients to recycle through homeless service providers, she was determined to find a solution that would impact people's experiences. She returned to College and earned a Bachelor's of Science in Human Service Management. With the tools in hand to facilitate change, she returned to the organization as an Intern, secured a position as a Case Manager and within 10 months she was promoted to a Program Director. In her first 127 days Cheryl assisted a family's move from homelessness to homeownership, where they remain today. Addressing the issues of homelessness with the aim being sustainability is Cheryl's objective.

We endeavor to address homelessness under the five critical domains of family stability, well-being, education & training, financial literacy and employment and career management through a coaching process that sets smart goals and help families to organize, track and optimize their changes in the domains overtime. Objective is to ensure families transition from our programming to maintain or acquire and sustain market rate housing. The project is scaled to assist other organizations in Metro Atlanta achieve housing sustainability when working with their clients, as well as help individuals and families in Gwinnett County, GA where there is a lack of affordable housing. Also, over 12% of people are unemployed and even more under employed. Homelessness in the county is disproportionately affecting single, minority women. Ensuring families are positioned to achieve economic self-sufficiency is a win for families and the community. Keeping a family housed saves taxpayers over 68k per year.

Due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, in August 2020 Gwinnett County, GA will lift the eviction moratorium. Over 25,000 families with late rental payments will be expected to acquire 4 months' rent or face eviction. A 2018 CAPER survey suggest that existing county homeless providers had the capacity to serve 150-250 clients. Surrounding Metro Atlanta counties account for another 464,000 thousand people with late mortgage and rental payments.  This situation will overload Metro Atlanta's social service systems and cause an unconscionable number of individuals and families to seek eviction prevention or homelessness services. What's more, the traditional one-time hand out service models will not adequately address the issue. It will not fix the issues of mental health, damaged credit, or support the skill building necessary for helping individuals manage finances or secure living wage employment. The transformative collaborative services offered through SOS will ensure client's increase earnings, save, and pay down debt to move them toward economic self-sufficiency and help other Metro Atlanta service providers do the same.

SOS will demonstrate a service model that offers effective prevention strategies and sustainable outcomes for preventing and combatting homelessness by modeling the behaviors of a transformative organization and teaching other helping organizations to engage sustainability strategies.  We plan to consult with the 11 major homeless service providers in the Metro Atlanta, providing ongoing training and supportive services while offering the same service and demonstrating measurable outcomes to the Gwinnett County community. The SOS direct service model will include collaborative partnerships between the Case Coach and the participant to develop a solid plan that is supported by community resources and addresses the challenges that prevent families from sustaining housing. Our goal for individuals and organizations is to help facilitate a client's positive movement toward economic self-sufficiency. Addressing mental and physical health concerns, providing the education and training needed to increase their earnings, pay down debt build credit and save. We will measure the success of organizations that we consult and clients that we serve by the growth client experience under all five domains and the length of time they remain housed.  

The service area is Metro Atlanta and 82% of the clients currently served by organizations offering homeless services is single black females with 2 or more children. Over the last two years, Gwinnett County has worked on a coordinated-entry shelter model for addressing homelessness. However, to date, the HomeFirst services are not fully operational and prevention funds are limited by one-time handouts, government grants and unreasonable eligibility standards. In order to ensure our clients are set up for success, SOS will collaborate with other community organizations such as Catholic Charities for financial counseling services, Viewpoint Health for the physical and mental health needs of clients, and Work Source Georgia for employment, education, training and skills building opportunities.  Services will be coordinated between the service providers the client and the Case Coach. The Case Coach will maintain a tool that will help families prioritize and organize their plan under each of the five domains. The SOS Humanitarian foundation will espouse the following principals:

An unconditional positive regard for clients

Client choice and self determination

Recovery orientation to service

Individualized and client driven supports

Community resources integration

Outcomes based service delivery model

According to HUD, seventeen out of 10,00 people in the United States were experiencing homelessness at the time of the annual point and time count taking place in January of 2019. This number will be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and moreover not helped by the very systems put in place to assist due to the need to expand services that focus on housing sustainability. Our services move past the one-time assistance model meeting families where they are and providing the support needed for families and organizations to drive homelessness prevention and housing sustainability.

My partner in this endeavor and I came up with the SOS Humanitarian Foundation while working together with a homeless organization. We realized that the antiquated hand out service model was not effective. Clients were only temporarily helped by one-time handouts and stipends but were not taught what was needed to become self-sufficient. Therefore, clients typically returned for help again within months and or when stipends ended. We saw families housed in apartments they could not afford so that organizations could check the housed box and we also witnessed first-hand the devastating impact this system had on families. Families wanted to do better, but needed the tools, support and direction. We consulted with the community of providers and determined that an outcomes-based process was needed that helped families with temporary assistance while walking them through a process that helped to identify issues, change behaviors and build a solid base through the five critical domains for achieving economic self-sufficiency. 

The project is important to me because I was raised by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet, moved constantly and poorly managed household resources. If my mother would have had the resources and or tools, I believe that she would have made better choices. The families we encounter want to do better but are not equipped to do so. They don’t fully understand the negative impact of poor credit or that their housing cost should be no more than 30% of their gross income, budgets or smart goals. Our task is to empower them through a process that uncovers and introduces what it will take for them to stabilize and thrive. Teaching families what is necessary to achieve economic self-sufficient should be the goal of all homelessness programs.  

Whitney Bexley, the Chief Operating Officer has over 15 years of nonprofit work experience and is considered a change agent and innovative leader in the Gwinnett County where she was born and raised. Her most recent opportunity was to consult with a transitional housing program that received a private grant for mortgages assistance related to COVID issues. Within two weeks she helped establish policies and procedures to identify and assess those in need and disburse and account for or 100K in funds. The 3-month project was delivered within the specified time period and within budget. 

Cheryl Carter, the Chief Programming Officer has over 30 years of nonprofit management experience and 3 years of successful experience working with homeless families. Her innovative approach to client empowerment and the successes demonstrated by clients quickly elevated her from Case Manager to Program Director. She successfully moved families from homelessness to housing and ensured 92% of the families under her direction transitioned into market rate housing.

The SOS Humanitarian Foundation planning process began in June of 2019 with a planned launch date of June 2021 affording the organization the opportunity to vet and recruit board members, develop consulting and program strategies, identify office space, staff and raise much need operating dollars. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the community’s anticipated critical need for services we moved our launch date to August 2020. What's more our inaugural fundraising event, a concert planned for May with nationally renowned recording artist was postponed due COVID We are expanding the role of our volunteers to help with critical task and reimagining our Concert that is rescheduled and will be billed as a concert in the car. Both Cheryl and Whitney have been known to turn tough situations into chances to shine. 

Hired by Friends of Zoo Atlanta as the Assistant to the Development Director. Two weeks later the ZOO was named one of the ten worst Zoo's in the country and all of the administrative staff was fired accept me. I was left in place because I was too new to be complicit and to naive to say no to the job they were asking me to do, "field all of the complaints from disgruntled citizens, As the complaints died down, with no direction from leadership I began researching other zoos across the country, formulated a survey and called what was considered the 10 best zoo's in the country. Compiled the research and made it available at the next board meeting during my note taking responsibilities. So surprised that my little research project resulted in three major facts; most Zoo were moving to natural habitat facilities and were moving away from the concept of caged facilities, they had nonprofit entities that served as their fundraising arm and they engaged successful capital campaign. 9 years and 25M later I left the successful Zoo to consult on other projects such as the Tennessee Aquarium, the Bessie Smith Hall and the Creative Discovery Museum.