Restoring hope and equipping children and families for lives with meaning and purpose.  It’s the mission statement Hope Harbor has taken on, but what does it mean?  To Hope Harbor, it means doing everything we possibily can to change the lives of as many children and families as possible.  It means staff members who lovingly commit their time to work with teens and their families through the Children’s Home and Academy.  It means providing counseling in the community to help children of all ages who don’t need residential placement, but who need individual help or whose families need counseling.  It means offering parent training through church and community settings to help mothers, fathers, grandparents, and all other caretakers to be effective in the lives of children.  It means taking parent training into prison settings to teach mothers and fathers who are in jail what they can still do to help keep their children from following the same path.  And it means offering all of these services regardless of ability to pay.

Hope Harbor has set an ambitious target of serving 2,000 people a year by 2015.  We’re well on our way to meeting, and hopefully exceeding that target.  Along the way, opportunities to provide a low-cost thrift store in Claremore, one that serves the needs of the community while still raising funds to support Hope Harbor’s efforts, has unfolded at a surprisingly rapid pace.  As so many individuals and families struggle with economic hardship, Thrift Harbor has given us one more way of restoring hope.