Chantelle Jones used to squat in empty homes with her five children just to keep a roof over their heads. Today, she holds a high school diploma, has stable housing, and watches her kids run track, box, cheer, and play soccer instead of worrying about where they'll sleep next.
Jones's turnaround came through COTS Detroit's Passport to Self-Sufficiency program, which pairs families with mobility coaches who work alongside them for years at a time, according to WXYZ. Those coaches help families set goals around education, employment, finances, and family stability, staying connected to parents for almost up to five years. Through the program, Jones received support toward high school completion, housing, financial assistance, and overall stability, and she recently graduated from it after earning her diploma.
COTS Detroit CEO Cheryl Johnson said the organization realized years ago that simply placing families into housing wasn't enough to break the cycle of poverty. “Lasting change takes time,” Johnson said, according to the same WXYZ report. That realization led COTS to create the Passport to Self-Sufficiency program a decade ago, built specifically to promote lasting stability rather than temporary fixes.
A Decade of Coaching Families Toward Stability
The program has since helped nearly 1,000 adults successfully complete it, per the station's report. Rachel Minion, who was once homeless herself with her eight children, said she watched Jones's transformation firsthand, describing how Jones changed her habits and rebuilt her life over time.
Jones said her children are no longer homeless and now participate fully in school and extracurricular activities. She attributed her family's newfound stability directly to the support she received through COTS. She also recalled a moment that stuck with her: her oldest son recognizing, in his own words, that the family was no longer without a home.
COTS Marks Ten Years With a Look Back and Ahead
The timing of Jones's story lines up with a broader milestone for the nonprofit. COTS Detroit released a publication titled “COTS is Care” in September 2026 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Passport to Self-Sufficiency framework, documenting a decade of work stabilizing families experiencing homelessness or at risk of losing their housing, according to BridgeDetroit. Johnson has also spoken publicly on Detroit PBS's American Black Journal about how the program is designed to disrupt generational poverty, and the organization says it plans to keep helping Detroit families move from surviving crisis to building a future over the next decade.
The framework itself tracks family progress across five domains: Housing & Family Stability, Health & Well-being, Economic Mobility & Empowerment, Education & Job Training, and Employment & Career Development, per COTS Detroit. Participants set self-directed targets in each area alongside their assigned mobility coach. COTS became the nation's first certified member organization in Mobility Mentoring® in October 2023, adopting the research-backed coaching framework developed by Boston-based nonprofit Economic Mobility Pathways, which notes that COTS serves roughly 1,200 individuals annually across its emergency shelter and supportive housing programs, with children making up about 60 percent of those served.
The Broader Crisis Behind One Family's Story
Jones's years-long path out of homelessness reflects a citywide pattern. A report commissioned by Detroit's Housing and Revitalization Department found that the average length of stay in Detroit shelters doubled from 35 days to 69 days over an eight-year period, with most unhoused households experiencing homelessness for the first time, according to Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries. The 2024 Point-in-Time count conducted by the Homeless Action Network of Detroit recorded 1,725 unhoused individuals on a single night in January 2024, up from 1,280 the year before, as reported by The Conversation.
Funding for the kind of supportive housing that families like Jones's rely on has also faced uncertainty. Proposed HUD federal funding changes faced a federal court injunction that temporarily paused the policy shift, per Legal News. The City of Detroit, meanwhile, has leaned on its own centralized system: the Detroit Housing Resource HelpLine at 866-313-2520, launched in May 2023 and expanded that September to serve as a single entry point for emergency shelter access and coordinated assessment, according to the City of Detroit. Between its launch and early 2026, the city's Housing Services office placed 5,168 residents into permanent housing and assisted 764 households with temporary housing.
COTS traces its own roots back to 1982, when it was founded as the Coalition on Temporary Shelter in response to Detroit's homelessness crisis, before expanding over four decades from emergency shelter operations into long-term supportive housing and economic self-sufficiency work. For Jones, that evolution translated into years of coaching rather than a single handoff of keys — and a family that, for the first time in a long time, isn't looking over its shoulder for the next move.
