www.SienaFrancis.org

History

Serving the Omaha and Council Bluffs metropolitan area since 1975, Siena/Francis House creates an environment in which people can find the motivation needed to precipitate adult behavioral change, moving in small, manageable steps.

The first step is to get our guests off the streets. Next we encourage sobriety in our recovery program, a traditional 12 step recovery process. Then we move to training in social and job skills, education and self-esteem, and finally to independent living training in transitional housing.

The Primary Mission

The Siena/Francis House is unique in that it cultivates the kind of responsibility required for productive lives. A result of this initiative is that our shelter is run almost entirely by homeless people in recovery. It has proven to be an excellent motivating factor, with many guests in our wet shelter anxious to join our therapeutic community and acquire job skills and training, By daily interactions with people in the work/recovery program, guests who are still caught in the homelessness and addiction cycle can see clear evidence of the potential to regain control over their lives.

Our belief is that by finding value and untapped abilities in people society has overlooked, we help them find value in themselves. With education, job training, counseling, and peer mentoring, we hope to furnish the tools that help residents recover from the primary problems that brought them to the doors of the emergency shelter, reducing recidivism rates among the population served. The primary goal of the Siena/Francis House is to work towards successfully ending the homeless cycle rather than providing only short-term, stop-gap treatments.