The Wellspring is one of Northeast Louisiana’s leading agencies serving the homeless. Programs and activities to address homelessness include these:

Lead agency in the Northeast Louisiana Homeless Coalition, which coordinates the area’s efforts to address homelessness. This entails providing office and storage space, manpower, and technical support for the coalition and its many members in our annual process of counting the homeless, assessing our area’s continuum of care for the homeless, addressing gaps in the system, locating and applying for funding, and other such efforts to make our area’s services for the homeless as seamless and cost-effective as possible.

Nearly all of the area’s housing and services for homeless victims of domestic violence and their children is also provided by The Wellspring. In that role, we are also the lead agency in the Family Justice Center-Ouachita, one of only 15 such centers in the country funded as part of a national Bush Administration initiative to pilot co-location of services by all agencies that address the myriad aspects of domestic violence. 

One of the few agencies in NELA that houses and serves homeless families (those with dependent children under 18) through our Home at Last program.

The needs of homeless Katrina/Rita evacuees in Northeast Louisiana have also been successfully served by The Wellspring as a service provider for the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps. In that role, we have helped over 100 families get back on their feet and back on the road to recovery and home.

An active member (often taking leadership roles) of a number of the state’s agencies and coordinating bodies that address homelessness, the Wellspring has long played an active part in the Louisiana Interagency Action Council for the Homeless and the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence (DV is the second leading cause of homelessness among women).

A HISTORY OF SERVICES TO THE HOMELESS: The organization was founded in 1931 to provide appropriate housing for young women moving into the area to work. In the early 1980’s, the organization opened the Mary Goss Battered Women’s Shelter, to house women and their children homeless due to domestic violence. In the 1990’s the agency launched the area’s first transitional housing program, offering furnished apartment units throughout the region for those homeless due to domestic violence. Over the subsequent decades The Wellspring has expanded its efforts to address all homelessness throughout the area. This work has included the leadership roles outlined above, particularly as a leader in the Northeast Louisiana Homeless Coalition, as well as its work with LFRC.