New Hope Ministries

Founded in 1982, New Hope Ministries has assistance centers in Dillsburg, Dover, Hanover, Lemoyne, Mechanicsburg, and the New Oxford Communities, of south-central Pennsylvania which serve parts of Adams, Cumberland, and York Counties. We help over 20,000 individuals each year. New Hope does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religious affiliation, or any other distinguishing characteristic. Motivated by our mission to share the love of Christ by helping our neighbors in need, we provide emergency crisis assistance, food pantries, rent/mortgage assistance, help with medical needs, homeless and housing support, heat/utility assistance, transportation assistance, counseling, referral services, youth programs, holiday food baskets and gifts. In addition to basic needs, we offer ongoing support and guidance to help people become self-sufficient and stable over the long term through financial literacy, nutrition education, GED, employment preparation, and job training programs.

Every life transformed!

Goal One: Respond to emerging community needs within our agency's mission, capacity and expertise

Goal Two: Help our guests achieve stability and increase self‐sufficiency

Goal Three: Support children in poverty to achieve educational and life success

Our agency actively supports its employees in continuing education, professional membership, and skills development including conference attendance, regular in house trainings, board retreats, and individual supervision. We have a succession plan for board and staff leadership positions and actively engage in training so that all key roles in the agency have at least two backup persons for all essential duties. We try to promote internally to fill leadership positions and are always looking to develop talent and encourage our employees to fill leadership openings. We regularly accept educational interns in programs such as social work, and try to develop students in the field to make a difference in the human service field. As an experienced and prominent nonprofit in our region, we regularly mentor other nonprofits to develop their programs, agency infrastructure, and development programs to succeed in their areas of mission.

Our agency is committed to organizational excellence and has worked hard to have contingency plans in place for everything from natural disasters to budget shortfalls. We did not ever prepare to face a multi year major public health crisis like we are going through. Thankfully our agency's commitment to strategic reserves, responsive fundraising, and strong capacity and infrastructure meant that when the pandemic began we were well positioned to continue offering services and pivot to meet emerging community needs. In the early days when grocery store shelves were stripped clean and community food donations dried up overnight, our food pantries had a several month supply of food on hand and were able to continue serving our low income neighbors. We scraped together available resources and announced a $100,000 emergency assistance fund to meet housing expenses. By May of 2020, that had grown to $250,000 in assistance distributed. By year end, we had distributed more than $500,000 in emergency help. Over the next year, our agency distributed in excess of $1 million in emergency assistance, and are continuing to meet emergency food, housing, and other financial needs at a rate far in excess of prepandemic levels. Our agency coped with frequently changing public health regulations and guidance, and remained compliant with our Department of Health and CDC requirements throughout the pandemic, all while remaining open to serve our community's most vulnerable people. We had to develop new approaches for those who were homebound and medically compromised. Despite loss of staff due to quarantine or illness and the loss of close to two thirds of our volunteer force, we kept services coming and developed new programs and opened new program service locations to better serve the community.