Supporting families from every walk of life in our community. It all started with the desire to help children. It grew to become a comprehensive offering of programs benefiting people from every walk of life in several West Virginia counties. Our very first program was the Harambee Learning Center, in our Education division. The center provided area kids with an after-school program that offered h
elp with homework, mentoring, recreational activities and more. We quickly realized that many of the children faced risk factors including academic failure, extreme economic deprivation and exposure to alcohol and drugs. It was apparent that our community needed additional services to strengthen families. We quickly developed our Employment and Economic Empowerment divisions and the programs within them. We worked with TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) recipients, offering them workforce readiness training and job placement assistance. We also reached out to other low- and moderate-income residents, offering them financial counseling because many of them had credit problems. We saw that residents needed childcare, so we opened the Harambee Child Development Center, which created more jobs in an economically deprived community. We started helping them become more financially self sufficient through KISRA Works! Because so many of these families were headed by single mothers, we began helping men become better fathers and providers through our Pathways to Responsible Fatherhood Initiative. And because the majority of that program’s participants had criminal backgrounds, we established our Second Chance Mentoring Program. Finally, we saw that our mental health facilities were overcrowded. We created our Behavioral Health division and began befriending and supporting mental health patients so that they could remain at home. And because children get the best head start when they come into the world wanted, we opened the KISRA Family Planning Clinic in 2011. It’s been a joy, a learning experience and an evolution. From one after-school program and a desire to help kids came a comprehensive approach to answering the most urgent needs in our community.
