Covenant House
| Founded | New York City, U.S. (1972) |
|---|---|
| Type | Non-profit |
| Location |
|
| Services | Food, shelter and a variety of services to homeless youth between the ages of 14 and 20 |
|
Key people
|
Kevin Ryan, Sister Mary Rose McGeady, Father Bruce Ritter |
| Website | http://www.covenanthouse.org |
Covenant House is the largest privately funded agency in the Americas providing shelter, food, immediate crisis care, and an array of other services to homeless and runaway youth. In addition to basic needs, Covenant House provides care to homeless youth aged 14–20 (certain locations care for youth as young as 13 & grown-ups as old as 24), designed to transition them into an independent adulthood free from the risk of future homelessness. Covenant House offers services including healthcare, educational support/GED preparation/college scholarships, job readiness and skills training programs, drug abuse treatment and prevention programs, legal services, mental health services, mother/child programs, transitional living programs, street outreach and aftercare.
In the late 1960s, the Reverend Bruce Ritter, a Franciscan priest, stepped down from his post as a tenured professor at Manhattan College to begin a new ministry serving the city's poor. Joined by colleague Father James Fitzgibbon, he moved into a dilapidated tenement building in New York City's East Village, and along with a handful of friends, former students, and neighbors began an effort to help homeless and runaway youth. By 1970, Father Fitzgibbon had moved on to devote more time to drug counseling and other community ministries, but Father Ritter remained. Adrian Gately, Patricia Kennedy, and Paul Frazier joined him to create the Covenant Community. In 1972, Covenant House was officially incorporated with its first intake center established at 504 LaGuardia Place.
Now an established non-profit, Covenant House began to fundraise, using the monies to shelter homeless kids in Lower Manhattan and on Staten Island. In 1976, Father Ritter announced plans to create a multi-service center near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Covenant House then acquired a group of buildings on West 44th Street and moved its administrative offices to the new location.
Throughout the late 1970s, Covenant House continued to expand its social-service programs in New York City and began to branch out to other cities in 1980. For the next two decades, Covenant House grew under the leadership of Sister Mary Rose McGeady (1990–2003) and Sister Tricia Cruise (2003–2008), opening crisis centers in 21 more cities in the United States, Central America, and Canada.
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