The great business magnate, Henry Ford, once said: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” Over the last several months Journey Home and A Hand Up, a West Hartford-based nonprofit, have been in intentional conversations about our work and our future together. In an effort to capitalize on our individual strengths, we are happy to announce that our two organizations have created a partnership. We think that working together will allow us to be stronger together.

Similar to Journey Home’s Making a House a Home (MHH) program, A Hand Up (AHU) distributes donated goods to help people transition from homelessness to independent living. Since the inception of our MHH program here at Journey Home, we have struggled with storage and transportation issues. AHU has a large and wonderfully organized warehouse space near New Park Avenue in West Hartford, as well as a large moving truck. Unlike Journey Home, AHU does not have any paid staff. Instead, they have a very hard-working volunteer board of directors who is able to make everything happen. We have come to the conclusion that identifying our challenges and maximizing our strengths will allow us to serve more people more effectively and efficiently.

Of the new relationship, A Hand Up Board President, Michael Fishman said, “A Hand Up, Inc. is proud to announce that it is joining forces with Journey Home in its mission to end homelessness in Greater Hartford. We are very excited to be working together to use the strengths of both organizations to achieve this goal. We look forward to working with this wonderful organization, as we will be able to accomplish so much more with this new collaborative effort.”

We are beyond thrilled to be working with A Hand Up and we can’t wait to see where we are headed, together.