Stepping Stones Shelter

Stepping Stones Shelter is an emergency/assessment shelter for families, providing support to homeless families with children in order to move them from crisis to a stable home environment. By offering food, shelter, and supportive services in an atmosphere of dignity and respect, Stepping Stones provides hope for the future, strengthens families, and promotes self-sufficiency.

Stepping Stones Shelter provides homeless families with emergency shelter services, offering stability while working to chip away at barriers that families face to help them find stable, affordable housing. The case management team works with families, referring them to needed services, and working with them to come up housing programs, income and employment solutions. The emergency shelter provides food, clothing, shelter, support services and educational programming (focus is on housing, employment and financial literacy) while they are at the shelter.

We provide comprehensive services to any configuration of homeless families with children including, but not limited to, single mothers or single fathers with children, two-parent families with children and grandparents raising their grandchildren.

We have robust volunteer and donations programs, without which we could not operate. The community donates urgent needs items that can be used by families while they reside at the shelter and that help operate the shelter overall. We maintain an updated urgent needs list on our website. 

In addition, we have many "wish list" items donated for the families when they move out. These include some household goods (i.e., microwaves, coffee makers, dishes, pots and pans, utensils, etc.) to give them a leg up.

We have a dinner donor program that provides dinners 365 days a year for our families. Students can earn 3 SSL hours if they make and deliver a meal; However, they must sign up on our signup genius link and fulfill the requirements for a healthy, balanced and complete meal for the six families, which totals approximately 23 residents. Please contact Helen Domenici for assistance.

There are a variety of volunteer opportunities at Stepping Stones Shelter. You must be 15 years old do the following. The Montgomery County Public School system and community volunteers provide tutoring for the school-aged children at the shelter so they can catch up in school. Volunteers can also provide childcare and engage in fun activities with the children. However, any volunteer must submit an application and go through our volunteer process before helping with our families. If you are 18 years old, you must have a background check.  Student volunteers can earn 1 SSL hour per session. Furthermore, we welcome daytime volunteers who complete shelter-tasks and donation sorting; they too must go through the volunteer process.