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Project Dignity

serving the homeless with dignity, humility & love

What about the Pets?

What about the pets, you ask?  What do the homeless do with them when they become homeless?  We can’t answer for everyone, but we can tell you what we’ve observed in our years in the motels.

Shelters are overflowing with pets whose owners can no longer afford to take care of them.  Some have been responsibly surrendered.  Many have been abandoned, their secure little worlds ripped apart by owners too self-centered to do the right thing by their loyal companions.

Interestingly enough, we’ve observed that the motels abound with pets.  Why would anyone want to hold onto a pet they can’t feed or take care of, you ask?  Because their owners can’t imagine abandoning them or giving them up to a shelter for certain death.  Just as they would never give up their children, most motel residents do not abandon their pets.  They do the best they can to take care of them.

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February 24, 2014 /// Filed Under: Matters of the Heart, Practical Matters /// Tagged With: heart, homeless, pets, practical

Succession Plan–Do you have one?

Does your organization have a succession plan?  If it’s only in your head, you don’t.  A good succession plan must be in writing.  What is a succession plan, you ask?  It’s the guarantee that your vision, your passion, your life’s work will continue in the event of your untimely catastrophic injury or even worse, death.

You come a long way from the day when you decide to hand a homeless person a sandwich, to the day you serve thousands of people every year.  Building that kind of ministry takes planning and the successful persistence of it is in the details.  If the details die with you, the ministry dies with you.

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February 10, 2014 /// Filed Under: Practical Matters /// Tagged With: death, homeless, planning, practical, succession

Taking Time Off

Taking time off.  It doesn’t seem like something you should do if you’re truly committed to helping the homeless, right?  Wrong!!!  The absolutely worst thing you can do for yourself and your clients is to not allow yourself time off.  You are not a machine.  You are a normal, flesh and blood human being and just like that machine, you can break down if you don’t take care of yourself.

The cost to yourself isn’t just physical, although that can be pretty tiring in itself.  In the course of loving and serving your homeless friends you will see, hear and experience heartbreaking, unspeakably hard things.  Over time this has a cumulative effect.  If you don’t carve out some separate time for yourself to get away both physically and most importantly, mentally, you will implode.  No one was ever meant to keep just “going and going”.  You are not the Energizer Bunny.  Your batteries will definitely wear out.

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February 10, 2014 /// Filed Under: Matters of the Heart, Practical Matters /// Tagged With: heart, homeless, practical, recharge, rest, time off

What Makes a Great Volunteer?

Volunteers come in all shapes, sizes and attitudes.   They range all the way from the ones who are offering you their services because they’re sure they can improve on what you’re doing,  to the golden one who states on their volunteer application “Put me in wherever you need me.  I just want to help”.  This is your Great Volunteer!

Serving Our Homeless Friends with Love

Serving Our Homeless Friends with Love

Human nature being what it is, you will get many more of the former than the latter.  My advice is to listen to them.  Sometimes, they actually are right and have great ideas.  Don’t be so arrogant and defensive that you miss the opportunity to improve.  After all, you’re out there to help your homeless clients in the way that’s best for them.  That means considering anything that might be helpful and feasible.

On the other hand, after careful consideration if what is being suggested is something you know won’t work, because its:  too difficult to implement, beyond your budget, dangerous, outside of the scope of your vision/mission, etc., feel free to say so.  You are the boss.  You get to make the hard/unpopular decisions.  It’s up to you to steer the organization in the direction you and your board of directors have decided on.

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January 13, 2014 /// Filed Under: Matters of the Heart, Practical Matters /// Tagged With: heart, homeless, motels, practical, Volunteer, volunteers

Don’t try to solve everyone’s problems

The purpose of what we do is to show love

The purpose of what we do is to show love

Curb your inclination to want to try to solve everyone’s problems. It doesn’t make you a less compassionate person. It just keeps you sane. For one thing, you rob someone of their dignity when you try to take care of everything for them. It takes a while to develop a sense of what’s right and what’s too much.

Go slowly. How can you do too much, you may ask? They need everything, don’t they? You’ll know that you’ve done too much the first time you have to refuse someone something and all hell breaks loose because you’ve taken care of everything else up to now. Resist the urge to set yourself up as Santa Claus or the Good Fairy. It’s really quite insulting to your clients and exhausting for you. We probably lose more volunteers because of this than anything else.

Read more…

December 9, 2013 /// Filed Under: All Tips /// Tagged With: Adults, children, heart, homeless, motels, practical, problem-solving

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Latest Tips about Working with Children

  • Little Things Make a Huge Impact
  • Back to School–For Children Only?

Latest Tips about Working with Adults

  • Time to Cut the Cord
  • Back to School–For Children Only?

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  • Happy Father’s Day, Mom

A tribute to our Founder

In 1986 doctors told Linda Dunlap she had 6 months to live and she told them the Lord knew more about that than they did. She said He had a lot more work for her to do. She proved herself and God right by living another 22 ministry-packed years.

Linda went into the motels singlehandedly with nothing more than her backpack and a few medical supplies. She won the confidence of people who had never had anyone care about them or help them before. Her belief and vision that one person can make a difference grew into 10,000 people being helped annually by Project Dignity.

Remembering Linda →

What We Do

While we don’t feel anyone can ever fully understand the motel situation, we believe we understand it better than most. To our knowledge we are the only local organization who is focusing their services solely on the homeless population living in residential motels and we’ve been doing it since 1996.

It’s a long haul from homelessness to home, so our programs “wraparound” the challenges. Our first objective is to ease the burdens of daily living for our clients by assisting with necessities most of us take for granted–food, clothing and rent assistance.

Find out more →

Contact us

Got a question? Please feel free to contact us. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us:  714-534-4271

Fax us:  714-539-0214

Write us:
Project Dignity
651 N. Rose Drive, #D115
Placentia, CA 92870-7584
 
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