Phoenix Dream Center nonprofit helps families stay together in safety
This is one in a series of profiles of Arizona nonprofit service organizations that have received funding from The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com’s Season for Sharing fundraising campaign. To donate to this year’s campaign and help Arizonans in need, go to sharing.azcentral.com.
Organizers of The Phoenix Dream Center aim to give families and individuals a safe space.
Founded in 2006, the nonprofit organization provides assistance to thousands of people in the Valley who have experienced homelessness, addiction, incarceration, were victims of sex trafficking or who aged out of the foster care system.
“Our goal is to provide services and support that seek to address the physical, social, emotional and spiritual needs these individuals face,” said Natalie Blackwin, director of the discipleship program.
Phoenix Dream Center received a $5,000 Season for Sharing grant in 2019 for its Thrive Foster Care Prevention program. The program strives to help prevent the removal of children from their families due to a lack of basic needs and resources. It also provides support for separated families.
To contact the organization, visit its website at www.phxdreamcenter.org or call 602-346-8700.
Blackwin answered questions about her organization’s work and how Season for Sharing aided those efforts. Some of the answers were edited for length and clarity.
QUESTION: How was the program developed?
ANSWER: The Dream Center Network was founded by Tommy Barnett in 1994 with the first Dream Center in Los Angeles. Since then, the Dream Center Network has enjoyed a prolific period of expansion with over 270 Dream Centers worldwide.
In 2005, a small group of people, who just wanted to do good in our community, embarked on a mission to establish a Dream Center in Phoenix. Our goal was to find a need and fill it, to find a hurt and
heal it. We gathered together on a bus and toured around the city looking for different properties for sale.
Eventually, we came upon an old four-story Embassy Suites Hotel that was perfectly located near some of the city’s largest populations of atrisk youth and the homeless. Through a series of capital campaigns, $4.7 million in support was raised, which paid the building completely off within the first year.
We started the Phoenix Dream Center with community-based outreach services, which provided daily feedings to the homeless, to needy families, and to at-risk youth in the community. These outreaches eventually evolved into providing housing services with programs in sobriety, human trafficking, and life recovery.
Initially, the Phoenix Dream Center housed 60 people and reached 500 individuals through its services. Now, over 300 individuals call the Phoenix Dream Center their home and over 40,000 in the community receive critical food and hospitality-based services each month.
Q: How do you gauge your success?
A: To measure program success, the Phoenix Dream Center utilizes Lean 6 Sigma and Quality Assurance Based Business Practices. We measure success at the oneyear-out mark for a graduate of the program. This is to ensure that the program’s impact is lasting and sustainable, as well as to bring the definition of success in line with federally defined success rates among similar nonprofits.
We recognize a threetiered approach to measuring success outcomes, first being sociological success. The graduate is assessed with a five-factor tool to determine their successful maintenance of sociological success, such as are they maintaining their sobriety through groups, do they have a healthy network of friends and are they participating in healthy social functions.
Second is socioeconomic success, the graduate is assessed with a five-factor tool to determine their successful maintenance of socioeconomic success such as maintaining a debtfree life, paying restitutions or child support, having net positive employment and tithing to their local church.
Third is spiritual success, the graduate is assessed with a five-factor tool to determine their successful maintenance of spiritual success as it relates to a healthy life in the faith community such as church attendance, small group participation, and spiritual activities essential to healthy living.
Q: How many employees do you have?
A: We currently have 21 employees.
Q: What is your greatest need?
A: Every day our human trafficking hotline will ring. Sometimes the call is from a police officer or one of our other partners in law enforcement. Sometimes it’s a parent, but usually it’s a girl on the other end of the line calling for help. A girl trapped in human trafficking. We can always hear it in their voice. They are scared.
When the phone rang recently, it was another young girl who needed our help and had nowhere else to turn. She was at a bus stop in downtown Phoenix. Right now, we are in desperate need of funding for the first five days of care
for new girls that are rescued into our program. It costs us $123 a day to support the housing, staffing, food, medical, counseling, education, and legal costs for each survivor (the program is completely free to them).
The first five days are the most critical because during this period she will decide whether she
wants to stay or whether the trauma that she’s endured will convince her not to trust us.
Q: How did you spend your Season for Sharing grant?
A: Our last grant was spent to support the programmatic costs of our Foster Care Prevention Program. Our Foster Care Prevention Program helps prevent children from being removed from their families due to a lack of basic needs and resources and helps unify those families that may have already been separated.
We work in cooperation with the Arizona Department of Child Safety caseworkers and social workers.