It’s only a week until autumn officially begins! September is Self-Improvement Month; and, as the leaves change color and start to fall, lots of people feel like it’s time for them to turn over a new leaf too. 

When you’re stuck in the cycle of poverty and homelessness, turning over a new leaf can feel like an impossible task. Broken relationships, addiction, and financial struggles seem like insurmountable obstacles, and the weight of struggle can lead to despair.

Atlanta Mission seeks to address the root causes of homelessness, because we know that improving a person’s life takes more than a month’s worth of self-improvement work. True self-improvement begins with renewed hope and requires a committed community of support willing to walk beside you toward thriving again. Consider these three ways we’re actively helping our clients to improve their own lives:

Find hope.

Many of our clients arrive at Atlanta Mission through our emergency services. We operate three shelters across the Metro Atlanta area, and each one is designed as an entry point for hope. Clean beds, healthy meals, warm showers, and social services all invite our clients to imagine a different life than the one they’ve lived before. Each interaction is tailored to foster hopefulness in clients for whom hope has felt like a scarce commodity. We believe that when clients catch a glimpse of hope in our shelters, they’re taking the first step toward actively improving their lives.

Choose help.

An old Chinese proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Once our clients have breathed deeply of hope in our emergency services, Atlanta Mission invites them to take the next step toward flourishing. We invite them to choose help.

If you’ve made a choice and you’ve failed before, it’s easy to anticipate failure again. That’s why we’re so proud of our clients emerging from homelessness who choose again and again to pursue better lives. In our residential settings, clients harness their growing hope to affect real change in their lives. They attend life skills classes, learn to develop trusting relationships, and center their lives on the God who loves them. Each chore completed and class attended marks another step toward self-improvement that will last.

Make progress.

For all of our clients the end goal is the same: a reliable job, healthy relationships, and housing stability. But when progress seems slow, how do you know you’re getting there?

Atlanta Mission is committed to helping our clients make progress in every area of their lives. Our Ambassadors offer committed one-to-one relationships that help clients notice and celebrate the progress they are making toward their goals. Each client follows a personalized program so that success is measurable and attainable. Emerging from homelessness takes a lot of work, but the self-improvement that clients feel as they find new life is something to celebrate!