Annual Report

From the Executive Director

Dear Friends,

My heart is filled with gratitude as I report another successful year of service to the community. Thanks to you, I can continue to say with confidence that, despite a nationwide increase in family homelessness, no child in our community has to sleep outside. This remarkable accomplishment reflects the values, dedication, and generosity of this remarkable community.

New Hope’s 2025-2026 fiscal year has been characterized by ongoing refinement of our core services and continued expansion of our capacity through program innovation.

Through a partnership with the Indiana Youth Institute and the Lilly Endowment, we began offering ongoing family case management and other supportive services in the fall of 2024. Since that time, we have served 56 families in that program, and I am pleased to say that not a single one of those families has experienced a return to homelessness.

This year also saw a marked expansion in our family homelessness prevention work as our shelter team welcomed a Homelessness Prevention Specialist from Heading Home of South Central Indiana. This partnership underscores our shared commitment to making best use of community resources and minimizing long-term negative impacts on children by prioritizing homelessness prevention whenever possible. This program served more than 350 families this year, preventing homelessness more than 80% of the time. These initiatives together mark important progress in our mission to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-repeating in our community.

Our early learning program continues to provide excellent early childhood care and education to families who need it most in a mixed-income cohort, and this year we expanded our capacity by 20% to serve as many as 60 young children at any time. Through a partnership with Early Learning Indiana, nine members of our teaching team are pursuing degrees or credentials to be the best educators they can be for our kids. We also announced the beginning of specialized art and gardening programs for our young learners. Set to begin in the 2026-2027 school year, these programs mark our commitment to a well-rounded curriculum that supports whole-child development for all children.

An additional pride point came in June of 2026 when New Hope became the first social service agency to serve as a host site for the Bloomington Garden Club’s annual Summer Garden Walk. To our knowledge, New Hope’s gardens (including our pollinator gardens and our vegetable garden) are unique among peer agencies anywhere in the country. Let us know if you would like to tour our gardens!

When I think of how far this agency has come and all your investments and trust have allowed us to achieve in the past 15 years, I feel both humbled and brimming with hope and excitement for what we will do together in the next 15. Thank you for your sustaining partnership.

Warmly,

Emily Pike
Executive Director