Family Promise of Philadelphia (FPP), formerly Philadelphia Interfaith Hospitality Network (PIHN), is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit founded in 1991 with a mission to end family homelessness through direct aid, direct services and advocacy.
We aim to provide a holistic array of services utilizing a trauma-informed and “housing first” approach to ensure families can maintain their current residence and have housing stability. Our goal is to resolve and prevent problems disrupting household stability and self-sufficiency.
Through our core programming, we provide rental and security deposit assistance, landlord mediation, case management, material needs support (furniture, kid's clothes, toiletries, food), diapers, housing and financial literacy education, and more. Before PA Navigate, our referral system was tracked through a series of webforms, emails, and google spreadsheets. Our flagship Eviction Prevention and Family Relocation Programs received the highest amount of requests, approximately 20-40 a day, resulting in hundreds of requests a month. Because we are a small agency and small team, having to weed through each request to ensure they meet our eligibility requirements was time consuming for the staff but also for the clients in desperate need of services. At one point, our wait time ballooned to 10 weeks before a request would be addressed.
In May 2026, we began integrating PA Navigate into our referral systems to improve our response time and streamline intakes across programs. The difference has been staggering. With the help of our Community Engagement Manager LaKiesha Stewart, we’ve implemented screeners for our flagship programs to assess families based on our eligibility criteria. This tool offers families immediate responses about how we can support them and staff a clear picture of a family’s needs at the first point of contact. Adding data collection forms unified our screener and intake assessment forms under one platform, helping track and process eligible families through our programs more efficiently. If another program may better suit a family’s needs, we are able to make referrals to other programs (including our own), a feature we’ve utilized to help families access as many of our services as they choose.
Retooling our intake system with PA Navigate has also helped us manage staff capacity. For example, we realized that splitting our homelessness prevention programs into two, Eviction Prevention & Housing Support and Shelter Diversion & Family Relocation, would reduce siloes and improve internal communication about families. We split staff into teams, one overseeing eviction support, landlord mediation, and rental assistance requests, and another into staff supporting affordable housing searches and security deposit assistance requests. Using the notes feature, staff add comments to a client’s seeker profile, keeping staff abreast of a family’s progress and notify if additional referrals need to be made.
Before our integration with PA Navigate, the wait time for families was approximately 8-10 weeks. While the need is still great, our intake process for Family Relocation has whittled down to 1-2 week turnaround, and our Eviction Prevention process has been brought to a manageable 4-6 week wait time.
We would like to highlight the efforts of Jafaru Levere, our Intake Program Coordinator and Health Navigator. Jafaru is a Drexel student who came to Family Promise of Philadelphia as a co-op employee, and worked tirelessly to bring our intake process into PA Navigate, creating screeners and assisting staff in utilizing the system efficiently. FPP is extremely grateful and thankful for Jafaru lending his skills, talent, and expertise in transforming our referral and intake systems for the foreseeable future.
We are also thankful to the tireless efforts of staff at Community Action Agency Pennsylvania (CAAP) and FindHelp who make this work possible. We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to CAAP for our enrollment into the Trusted Partner Network, which connects us with a web of driven social service agencies to exchange best practices and recommendations.