METROPOLITAN FRESH START HOUSE

About The Metropolitan Fresh Start House

The Metropolitan Fresh Start House is a faith-based 24-hour residential live-in drug treatment facility that is licensed and certified by the State of California. The Fresh Start program is designed to restore broken men of society back to productivity, focus and faith.

Fresh Start residents doing construction work. Fresh Start residents unloading building materials.

Although there are many worthwhile community-based organizations that are working to improve the quality of life in inner-city communities, many programs have been forced to drastically reduce services or completely shut down due to government cutbacks; however, in spite of these government cutbacks, the MFSH Board of Trustees, volunteers and concerned individuals, have stepped in to fill the void through fundraising activities that have enabled continued growth and provision of new services each year without government funding.

The Metropolitan Fresh Start House program was founded by Kinwood H. DeVore (Minister of the Metropolitan church of Christ) October 1, 1989, and has grown phenomenally in quality and quantity of services to its clients for the past 17 years. Beginning with a faithful few who strongly believed that the purpose of the church was to serve the hurting people of their communities, the MFSH volunteers made the necessary sacrifices in time, commitment, money and love to first open Fresh Start's doors to the homeless who were addicted to drugs then, subsequently, became a center for the Red Cross to serve the homeless after the Loma Prietta Earthquake of October 17^th 1989, for the entire year.

Kinwood H. DeVore

Kinwood DeVore, the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Fresh Start House, a faith-based 24-hour residential drug rehabilitation treatment facility for men. Although Mr. DeVore has been involved in counseling addicts and their families for the past 30 years, he has also worked as Chaplain for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office at Santa Rita Jail for seven years; five of those years he served as Supervising Chaplain. His position involved managing more than 300 volunteers from many different religious faiths to work together as a team to share a general message with the inmates that might cause them to never again return to custody.

Mr. DeVore is also a motivational speaker and has presented to audiences all over the United States. He has also been a gospel minister for the past 36 years, and he currently ministers to the Metropolitan Church of Christ, a church that has received more than 40 awards for gang diffusion and curbing the dropout rate among high school and middle school students in San Francisco in the 1990s. Mr. DeVore, along with the members of the Metropolitan Church of Christ, started the Metropolitan Fresh Start House, which is now independent, and in its 17th year of operation.

Mr. DeVore grew up in San Francisco where he completed elementary, junior high, and high school before attending City College of San Francisco where he was a track star. He moved to the East Bay where he graduated from the Bay Area School of Religion in 1974, then moved to Southern California, where he worked as the Minister of Evangelism for the Inglewood Church of Christ, then a Pulpit Minister for the West Adams Church of Christ in Los Angeles.

Mr. DeVore has been married for 38 years, has six children and four grandchildren. Although his passion is working with people, he returned to his beloved San Francisco in 1988, for one reason: to save lives.

This original group of MFSH volunteers believed that no matter what the circumstance, people could change if they could rally the community to work together in concert to provide the love, support and encouragement needed to rebuild the lives of people broken down by life's circumstances. They also believed that they could make a large dent in the devastation brought on by the proliferation of drugs in their low-income socioeconomic underserved communities. MSFH then collaborated with several other community-based organizations such as Visitacion Valley Job and Employment Training and mental health organizations, detoxification organizations, medical clinics and the Veterans Administration to insure the best possible care for its clients.

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Graduates of the Metropolitan Fresh Start House program with staff members in June 2006.

The words of Sir. Winston Churchill, Never has so much been expected of so few, have been the embodiment of the efforts of the few MFSH volunteers along with the gracious monetary contributions of thousands of Christian individuals, churches and small businesses across the nation which have kept the MSFH doors open and allowed for growth and expansion of services over the past 17 years.