Promising developments

Only one string was attached to the donation of the facility: The church ministry must accept it fully furnished - no ifs, ands or buts about it.

That, coupled with another church signing on, pushed one local promise two steps closer to being fulfilled.

Eleven churches now are signed on to the Family Promise coalition - a group that hopes to offer some of the Permian Basin's homeless families a place to stay until they get back on their feet. The coalition received a donation of a 1,120-square-foot, fully furnished manufactured home from the local branch of Stallion Oilfield Services, which the ministry will use as a day center for families in need.

But Family Promise is not quite there yet.

The group still needs a suitably zoned location within the city limits to put the new facility, which will serve as a day location where the program's families can do things such as shower, change clothes, search for employment and work with a full-time social worker who will help them establish a new life.

 Local families who work with the Odessa chapter of Family Promise, which is a national organization that boasts an 80 percent success rate, will sleep in participating churches by night and will then go to the day center each morning. Transportation will be helped by vans donated to the organization several months ago.

Stallion spokesman Patrick Ellison said fully equipped means fully equipped.

The donation includes "couches to coffee pots to silverware" and even will include satellite television. The donated home, valued somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000 when purchased, once served the company's employees in the field.

"It should fit their needs," he said. "They're top-notch. We supply these houses for company men to live in every day. A lot of these company men will spend two to three years living in these houses at a time. They're nice facilities. We're not going to put them in something that's run down or something."

News of the donation of the day center facility was particularly uplifting for the nascent organization, which recently lost a bid for a former Odessa fire station on Golder Avenue, Ben Bretz said.

Bretz, one of the group's organizers, said he hadn't even finished asking a Stallion executive for the facility before he said yes.

The first thing that went through Bretz's head then was simple: "Wow."
"How could people do such great things?" he said. "It was a hurdle that we needed to overcome. God just put this in our hands."

And yet there's even more good news.
Bretz said local company J&M Transportation offered to transport the donated facility to its new location, but that, of course, is only after it finds a place to put it. 

"That's pretty neat," he said. "Normally, they would charge $2,500 just to do that."

Another development in the coalition's plight to establish itself is another name on its roster. New Life Chapel is the most recent church to offer its services and its facility to the local ministry.

Letticia Zuniga, the church's administrator, said it agreed to join the coalition because it liked the idea of helping individuals help themselves, the underlying premise of Family Promise.

"And of course there are children involved," she said. "Children are the future. And besides, that's what a church is for."

Family Promise members Ben Bretz, from left, and Randy McGuire accept the keys to their donated trailer Wednesday from Patrick Ellison with Stallion Oilfield Services. Family Promise plans to use the 1,120-square-foot trailer as a day center as soon as a site can be found for the trailer.