LAUNCH

Promise House celebrates its 25-year anniversary this year.

The Oak Cliff-based charity is the city’s only shelter for homeless and at-risk teenagers. Besides that, Promise House has eight other programs that help kids get off the streets and transition into adulthood. Promise House started as an adult Sunday school project at Lover’s Lane United Methodist Church, and now it serves thousands of kids — and sometimes, their kids — every year. We sat down with Promise House vice president of external affairs JUDY WRIGHT to talk about what Promise House does.

How is the 25-year anniversary campaign going, in light of the economy?

The economy has caused us to serve about 750 more clients than the year before with less money. You really have to hone your message for what you need and not panic. I’m really proud of my staff. They’ve put in extra work and extra time, and we were able to end the [budget] year in the black. We’ve had expensecutting all across the agency. If you’re raising money, people don’t necessarily want to fund you at a great level the next year if you have a huge deficit. So we attacked it head-on.

What was your fund-raising strategy?

We had funders who were not able to give at the same level this year. So we had to come up with a way to get more funders to give what they could. You have to let them know what their money is doing, how many kids were you able to feed and give a bed to that you wouldn’t have been able to help before. And if you communicate with them, they oftentimes want to give you more, and we had a record-breaking number of new funders this year.

Tell us a little about what Promise House does.

We give shelter to homeless, run-away and at-risk teens. About 78 percent of our clients are over 13, but we serve ages 0 to 24 through nine major programs. There’s a lot of movement within our programs, and I think that gives teens a lot of options. We focus a lot on education. We have two DISD classrooms for our shelter kids. We have other programs that focus on getting a GED or going to Dallas C.A.N. Academy, and we