Good News Partners

 

Since 1991 Blacksburg Presbyterian has worked with a faith-based inner city program in Chicago called Good News Partners (GNP), sending our people (young and young at heart) there in the summer to help repair and refresh inner city apartments. GNP provides affordable housing for otherwise homeless families with a step-by-step transition from interim housing to independent living. Their housing options include:

• New Life Interim Housing, a 32-bed shelter for otherwise homeless women and their     children;

•  a large single room occupancy (SRO) hotel, the Jonquil, accommodating 58 families;

•  2nd stage and GNP-subsidized rental housing; and

•  60 units of co-operative housing affordable for families with low and very low income.

In addition Good News Partners has created programs to support children and our youth to grow in their social, academic and personal capability.  Together, the GNP community works to create an empowering nurturing environment so positive changes in education and family dynamics can take place in the lives of the children and their parents. 

 

HistoryGNP began in 1976 in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, as youth and other interested members of the community focused on a better future.  In 1980 GNP incorporated as a separate 501 ( c ) 3 with the purchase of the Jonquil Hotel, once a haven for drugs, prostitution, and gangs. Since then they have rehabbed hundreds of units of housing, established shelter, rental housing, home ownership cooperatives, jobs and tutoring, and youth programs.