Miracle Messages
In 2016, Whitepages started a partnership with Miracle Messages, a volunteer service for homeless individuals to record messages and reach out to loved ones, in hopes of reuniting them. Steven, Manager of Customer Experience at Whitepages is responsible for the partnership and providing access to our application.
How do volunteers at Miracle Messages use Whitepages to assist people experiencing homelessness?
When Steven recently spoke with Kevin, Founder and CEO of Miracle Messages, he was excited to hear from Kevin that, “1,200+ volunteer digital detectives have access to the Whitepages app to look up the names of long-lost loved ones for our homeless clients, as a step toward helping them reconnect. The premium search tool is invaluable.”
As stated in the Miracle Messages volunteer manual, “Whitepages is the go-to tool for starting a search.” Their volunteers “use Whitepages to find phone numbers to call loved ones” and “use it as a cross-referencing tool to narrow a search.”
Jess, Chief Programs Officer further shares, “Miracle Messages helps people experiencing homelessness reconnect with their loved ones, and the first piece of doing that is finding a way to contact the loved one. Whitepages is our go-to, first-in-line tool for finding contact information (mostly phone numbers and physical addresses) for loved ones.”
Timothy’s Story
Jess voiced that some of their most exceptional successes have used Whitepages to find loved ones. Here is Timothy’s story:
Timothy was referred to Miracle Messages by a caseworker at St. Anthony’s Foundation in San Francisco. He was on his second stint being homeless in the city — he had tried to return home five years earlier but hadn’t been able to locate his family in Chicago. The family no longer lived in the house that he remembered, and the only phone number he had no longer worked.
A volunteer, Nancy, researched Timothy’s case. Unable to find a working phone number, she wrote a handwritten letter to a street address she found on Whitepages. Within a week, we received an email from Timothy’s family. They had been looking for him and wanted to bring him home.
Timothy got on a bus home a few weeks after the letter was received. He has been living with his sister Betty and his niece ever since. He is happy, healthy, housed, and surrounded by people that love him.
How many people have been helped since the relationship with Whitepages began?
It has been about two years since we posted our initial blog about our partnership. At this point, Miracle Messages has reconnected 156 people and Whitepages has been instrumental in about one-third of those cases.
Whitepages continues to create pathways for reconnection. We hope that we can continue to assist in the good works of community organizations like Miracle Messages for years to come.
