About Families Renewed

Families Renewed exists to help children and families facing homelessness, struggling with suicidal thoughts and self-harm, and living with the effects of abuse — by strengthening the family that surrounds the child.

Our mission

It is the mission of Families Renewed, Inc. to provide relief to children and families suffering from the trauma caused by the break down of the family structure by renewing the family support systems that are at the core of a child's sense of safety and security, and to increase the strength of the family to be the structure, as ordained by God, on which their lives and the lives of future generations are built. Families Renewed, Inc. will accomplish this mission through a combination of providing immediate crisis intervention designed to mitigate emergent family crises through the strategic use of its own resources and relationships with ministry partners, government agencies and organizations, and non government organizations; and by providing community based programs and ministries that proactively address the familial, marital, parental, and financial needs of children, families, single parents, and communities.

Where we work

We are located in York County, Pennsylvania, and York County is our primary service area. The wider area we serve runs the Harrisburg–Baltimore corridor: Lower Dauphin, Eastern Cumberland, and Lancaster counties and the City of Harrisburg in Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Carroll, Northern Howard, and Western Harford counties and Baltimore City in Maryland.

We are focused on children and families. We do not turn anyone away — where someone falls outside what we do, we refer them to an organization equipped to help.

How we began

Families Renewed began in a men's Bible study. Our founder, Bruce Norton, spent three years in Men's Fraternity, and in the third year the idea of an organization to help families in crisis surfaced in his mind. The man who facilitated that study later told him he had been talking about it since the first day.

The founding scripture was Ephesians 5:25–29, and the organization was founded as the American Family Crisis Ministry.

Why we changed our name

The name changed because the method did.

Our founder tells a story from his years with a fire department search and rescue team. They were training on the rock face at Chickies Rock when a bystander asked whether they ever helped people, then said two of his friends were stuck free-climbing the far side. They radioed it in, picked the two men off the rock, and brought them down. At the bottom, a park ranger wrote the climbers a ticket for climbing where they should not have been. Packing up his gear, he looked over and watched the same two men start back up the same rock.

That is what rescue alone does. It returns people to the rock. As long as an organization only rescues, there is always someone to rescue and the line never gets shorter.

So the work moved toward prevention, and the name moved with it. Families Renewed is what the organization became when it stopped measuring itself by how many families it pulled off the rock and started measuring whether they went back up.

How we work

Rescue is stepping in to resolve an emergency on a family's behalf. Assist is working through it alongside them, so the family holds the tools afterward. Assisting is our primary method, because it is the one that leaves a family stronger than we found it. Straight rescue still happens, hours from an eviction, but it is the exception rather than the plan.

Who we are

Our work is directed by a Board of Directors and informed by an Advisory Board of professionals in counseling, fundraising, ministry, and communications.

Accountability

Our governing documents and policies are public: our bylaws, conflict-of-interest policy, and financial documents, along with our privacy, non-discrimination, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and endowment fund policies.