Emergency Shelters Business Plan

Transitional Housing of Pittsburgh is an organization that provides transitional housing and life skill training for women. It offers assistance to women, frequently homeless, as they move from dependent, often abusive relationships into independent, self-sufficient lifestyles. Additionally, it assists clients in child reunification. This is particularly important as 80% of the clients have children but no custody.

This is the city’s only women-only facility and the only one with long-term transitional housing. All other shelters only offer 30 days or less of housing whereas Transitional Housing offers up to two years. On staff is a chemical dependency counselor, AIDS counselor, and a family reunification counselor to assist clients.

Transitional Housing offers 65 rooms, each with its own kitchen facility to homeless women. Each client is allowed to stay for up to one year as long as they are clean and sober (random drug and alcohol testing determines this), and have no other place to go. Additionally, each client must be an active participant of the program:

Collaborative Approach to Empowering Individual. This program is an eight-step program to develop self-sufficient clients. The different elements of the program are:

1. Personal development planning.
2. Vocational development.
3. Substance abuse prevention.
4. Interpersonal skill development.
5. Personal and spiritual development.
6. Community involvement.
7. Creative leisure activities/celebration.
8. Independent living preparation/follow up.

Transitional Housing is a women-only facility. This is of significant value to the clients as it eliminates the possibility of sexual abuse from the opposite sex within the facility. This is Transitional Housing’s competitive edge, for more detail please refer to section 5.1.