Bethesda Cares, Inc.

Our mission is to prevent, ease and end homelessness.

Prevent

Many Montgomery County residents have housing but face financial crises, teetering on the brink of losing their homes. Maybe a wage-earner lost a job, and that family cannot pay both their utilities and rent. Rather than choosing between heat and rent, or food and rent, we oftentimes are able to provide short-term financial assistance to prevent an eviction or lapsed water or electricity access.

Ease

We offer a Drop-In Center where clients can come out of the weather and find a warm cup of coffee, snacks, and toiletries (Monday through Friday); a temporary mail service for those with no fixed address; a daily hot meal program (every day of the week including holidays); a Clothing Closet (Tuesdays and Thursdays); and a weekly shower program (Tuesdays). Additionally, our psychiatrist offers a weekly group and individual counseling (Wednesdays).

End

Our Outreach Team reaches out to clients where they are located: in our parks, our Metro stops, our parking garages.  Whatever the client’s needs, we work to form individual strategies to help each client to exit homelessness. As we engage our clients, building trusting relationships with them, we offer food, clothing, and access to a licensed clinical social worker.

Bethesda Cares is a strong supporter of the Housing First movement, an alternative to the traditional shelter system.  Through Housing First, an approach now considered a nationwide best practice, we place people, regardless of their physical or mental challenges, into permanent housing.  We then bring supportive services to them, helping them cope with their issues from that stable platform.  We believe coping with such challenges are not precursors to housing; rather, they will flow from the safety and stability that comes from having a permanent home in the first place.

Founded in 1988, Bethesda Cares is a community outreach program for people living unsheltered, and for people in homes who are at severe risk of losing them. Don't be fooled by our name: we work throughout Montgomery County! We seek to place people in permanent, supportive housing; to ease life on the street during that process; and to protect low-income tenants in crisis from eviction and possible homelessness. For some of our clients, homelessness is a difficult but transitory period that they ultimately resolve on their own, by landing needed work or finding friends or family to help them through. Other clients have been on the street for years. Some feel deeply detached from and abandoned by society, and may resist help despite sorely needing it. We slowly build trust, then work with partners to place these clients into homes. Regardless of whether their homelessness is temporary or chronic, Bethesda Cares provides all clients a haven where they know they won't be told to move along.