In chatting with a volunteer afterwards, she and her daughter told me about one of the families they were sitting with. As his case manager talked about the victories of his family, this tough-looking man’s eyes brimmed with tears. Dots connected – how important this work is. And that they got to be a part of it? That’s something really special.

Changing lives and strengthening families – that’s what it means to end family homelessness. Not mere buildings or programs or resources…it’s lives changed one at a time. Thank you for all you do to help us serve these families – we couldn’t do it without you!

Puyallup-area homeless advocates get $70,000

Paul Allen Foundation grant should help about 125 families this year
Neil Pierson/of The Herald
Published: February 3rd, 2010 06:00 AM

A four-month-long waiting game concluded happily for Puyallup’s Helping Hand House on Jan. 26 when it received a $70,000 grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Helping Hand House, which has been assisting homeless families throughout East Pierce County for the past 25 years, was one of 66 non-profit groups in the Pacific Northwest to receive an Allen Foundation grant. The foundation, started by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and his sister, Jo Lynn Allen, is donating $4.6 million this year, much of it to groups that assist low-income individuals and families.

Helping Hand House Executive Director Nola Renz said last week that the grant should help about 125 area families during the next year.
“The money will be used in our homeless prevention programs to assist more families who are at risk of eviction or utility shut off,” Renz said.

Receiving a grant from the Allen Foundation is a tough task, Renz explained, because only certain organizations are invited to apply. Helping Hand House applied for its grant last fall after meeting and talking with foundation officials.

Philanthropic efforts have been a part of the Allen Foundation’s mission for 20 years, said Bill Vesneski, the group’s evaluation, planning and research director. Helping Hand House stood out as a worthwhile cause because it’s widely known for excellent service, he said.

“They’ve had a very strong commitment as to measuring and monitoring their impact,” Vesneski said.

The money is especially welcome to Helping Hand House at a time when rising unemployment rates are putting more families at risk of living on the streets. The non-profit agency, which has helped more than 4,600 families in Puyallup, Sumner, South Hill and surrounding areas in the past 25 years, isn’t coming close to meeting demands. Two months ago, the group told Puyallup City Council members it had turned away more than 1,600 families during a six-month span of 2009.

“It has been an enormous challenge to continue to serve more families,” Renz said. “There’s limited resources so we’re always turning families away. That’s the discouraging part.”

The Allen Foundation focuses on a number of opportunities in its gifts, including community arts and music programs, youth education classes and job skill development courses.

The foundation has shifted its priorities to focus on victims of the national recession, Visneski said, and more groups like Helping Hand House are on the slate for grants in 2011.

“The goal is to kind of get the money into emergency relief, to get the money where it’s needed,” Visneski said. “We wanted to make sure we were doing work in Pierce County.”

Helping Hand House prides itself on being a lasting solution to homelessness because families who seek transitional housing opportunities learn to be financially sound and gain employment skills. The organization estimated at least three of four families that complete a transitional housing program don’t become homeless again.

“The exciting thing is that when families leave us they have a permanent solution,” Renz said. “They go into a situation where they have a home and a living-wage job.”

(Can’t see the video? Please click here to go to C-Span video)

- 115 birthday cakes were donated ($1,150 at $10.00 per cake)
- 1,102 total volunteer hours
- 150 volunteers throughout the year
- 13 group yard projects were completed
- 38 volunteers volunteered on an ongoing basis (birthday cakes, birthday gifts, roberts cleaning, etc.)
- 151 quilts received ($13,090)
- Supply drive donations (toilet paper, paper towels, toys, books, etc) ($4,118)
- 2 cars donated ($2,575)
- Holidays (Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Back to School) ($56,839)
- Household furnishings (includes furniture and other household items) ($8,943)

And this total doesn’t even include the use of a duplex, donated every year by the South Hill Rotary, and other donated units across Pierce County.

Isn’t that amazing?? Thank you to each and every one of you that contributed to our families this year – this is $113,616 worth of assistance that went directly to serving some of the neediest families in our community. Kudos! You do it well, Pierce County!

The link is below, as is the full text of the article – if you go to the page, be sure to check out the interactive maps on the left side of the article. Just click on the maps for larger views and more info. The first one shows that the increase since 2007 in the number of people living solely on food stamps in WA was 56%. The second map shows usage across the country. If you hover your mouse on WA you get popup boxes for each county with stats on usage. You can also zoom in – control is on the right side of the map or you can double-click. In Pierce County 13% of people use food stamps and 21% of the children are in households using food stamps. Usage is up 63%.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html?emc=eta1

January 3, 2010

CAPE CORAL, Fla. — After an improbable rise from the Bronx projects to a job selling Gulf Coast homes, Isabel Bermudez lost it all to an epic housing bust — the six-figure income, the house with the pool and the investment property.

Now, as she papers the county with résumés and girds herself for rejection, she is supporting two daughters on an income that inspires a double take: zero dollars in monthly cash and a few hundred dollars in food stamps.

With food-stamp use at a record high and surging by the day, Ms. Bermudez belongs to an overlooked subgroup that is growing especially fast: recipients with no cash income.

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.

Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent over the past two years. About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.

“It’s the one thing I can count on every month — I know the children are going to have food,” Ms. Bermudez, 42, said with the forced good cheer she mastered selling rows of new stucco homes.

Members of this straitened group range from displaced strivers like Ms. Bermudez to weathered men who sleep in shelters and barter cigarettes. Some draw on savings or sporadic under-the-table jobs. Some move in with relatives. Some get noncash help, like subsidized apartments. While some go without cash incomes only briefly before securing jobs or aid, others rely on food stamps alone for many months.

The surge in this precarious way of life has been so swift that few policy makers have noticed. But it attests to the growing role of food stamps within the safety net. One in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children.

Here in Florida, the number of people with no income beyond food stamps has doubled in two years and has more than tripled along once-thriving parts of the southwest coast. The building frenzy that lured Ms. Bermudez to Fort Myers and neighboring Cape Coral has left a wasteland of foreclosed homes and written new tales of descent into star-crossed indigence.

A skinny fellow in saggy clothes who spent his childhood in foster care, Rex Britton, 22, hopped a bus from Syracuse two years ago for a job painting parking lots. Now, with unemployment at nearly 14 percent and paving work scarce, he receives $200 a month in food stamps and stays with a girlfriend who survives on a rent subsidy and a government check to help her care for her disabled toddler.

“Without food stamps we’d probably be starving,” Mr. Britton said.

A strapping man who once made a living throwing fastballs, William Trapani, 53, left his dreams on the minor league mound and his front teeth in prison, where he spent nine years for selling cocaine. Now he sleeps at a rescue mission, repairs bicycles for small change, and counts $200 in food stamps as his only secure support.

“I’ve been out looking for work every day — there’s absolutely nothing,” he said.

A grandmother whose voice mail message urges callers to “have a blessed good day,” Wanda Debnam, 53, once drove 18-wheelers and dreamed of selling real estate. But she lost her job at Starbucks this year and moved in with her son in nearby Lehigh Acres. Now she sleeps with her 8-year-old granddaughter under a poster of the Jonas Brothers and uses her food stamps to avoid her daughter-in-law’s cooking.

“I’m climbing the walls,” Ms. Debnam said.

Florida officials have done a better job than most in monitoring the rise of people with no cash income. They say the access to food stamps shows the safety net is working.

“The program is doing what it was designed to do: help very needy people get through a very difficult time,” said Don Winstead, deputy secretary for the Department of Children and Families. “But for this program they would be in even more dire straits.”

But others say the lack of cash support shows the safety net is torn. The main cash welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, has scarcely expanded during the recession; the rolls are still down about 75 percent from their 1990s peak. A different program, unemployment insurance, has rapidly grown, but still omits nearly half the unemployed. Food stamps, easier to get, have become the safety net of last resort.

“The food-stamp program is being asked to do too much,” said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington advocacy group. “People need income support.”

Food stamps, officially the called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have taken on a greater role in the safety net for several reasons. Since the benefit buys only food, it draws less suspicion of abuse than cash aid and more political support. And the federal government pays for the whole benefit, giving states reason to maximize enrollment. States typically share in other programs’ costs.

The Times collected income data on food-stamp recipients in 31 states, which account for about 60 percent of the national caseload. On average, 18 percent listed cash income of zero in their most recent monthly filings. Projected over the entire caseload, that suggests six million people in households with no income. About 1.2 million are children.

The numbers have nearly tripled in Nevada over the past two years, doubled in Florida and New York, and grown nearly 90 percent in Minnesota and Utah. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, one of every 25 residents reports an income of only food stamps. In Yakima County, Wash., the figure is about one of every 17.

Experts caution that these numbers are estimates. Recipients typically report a small rise in earnings just once every six months, so some people listed as jobless may have recently found some work. New York officials say their numbers include some households with earnings from illegal immigrants, who cannot get food stamps but sometimes live with relatives who do.

Still, there is little doubt that millions of people are relying on incomes of food stamps alone, and their numbers are rapidly growing. “This is a reflection of the hardship that a lot of people in our state are facing; I think that is without question,” said Mr. Winstead, the Florida official.

With their condition mostly overlooked, there is little data on how long these households go without cash incomes or what other resources they have. But they appear an eclectic lot. Florida data shows the population about evenly split between families with children and households with just adults, with the latter group growing fastest during the recession. They are racially mixed as well — about 42 percent white, 32 percent black, and 22 percent Latino — with the growth fastest among whites during the recession.

The expansion of the food-stamp program, which will spend more than $60 billion this year, has so far enjoyed bipartisan support. But it does have conservative critics who worry about the costs and the rise in dependency.

“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.

With nearly 15,000 people in Lee County, Fla., reporting no income but food stamps, the Fort Myers area is a laboratory of inventive survival. When Rhonda Navarro, a cancer patient with a young son, lost running water, she ran a hose from an outdoor spigot that was still working into the shower stall. Mr. Britton, the jobless parking lot painter, sold his blood.

Kevin Zirulo and Diane Marshall, brother and sister, have more unlikely stories than a reality television show. With a third sibling paying their rent, they are living on a food-stamp benefit of $300 a month. A gun collector covered in patriotic tattoos, Mr. Zirulo, 31, has sold off two semiautomatic rifles and a revolver. Ms. Marshall, who has a 7-year-old daughter, scavenges discarded furniture to sell on the Internet.

They said they dropped out of community college and diverted student aid to household expenses. They received $150 from the Nielsen Company, which monitors their television. They grew so desperate this month, they put the breeding services of the family Chihuahua up for bid on Craigslist.

“We look at each other all the time and say we don’t know how we get through,” Ms. Marshall said.

Ms. Bermudez, by contrast, tells what until the recession seemed a storybook tale. Raised in the Bronx by a drug-addicted mother, she landed a clerical job at a Manhattan real estate firm and heard that Fort Myers was booming. On a quick scouting trip in 2002, she got a mortgage on easy terms for a $120,000 home with three bedrooms and a two-car garage. The developer called the floor plan Camelot.

“I screamed, I cried,” she said. “I took so much pride in that house.”

Jobs were as plentiful as credit. Working for two large builders, she quickly moved from clerical jobs to sales and bought an investment home. Her income soared to $180,000, and she kept the pay stubs to prove it. By the time the glut set in and she lost her job, the teaser rates on her mortgages had expired and her monthly payments soared.

She landed a few short-lived jobs as the industry imploded, exhausted her unemployment insurance and spent all her savings. But without steady work in nearly three years, she could not stay afloat. In January, the bank foreclosed on Camelot.

One morning as the eviction deadline approached, Ms. Bermudez woke up without enough food to get through the day. She got emergency supplies at a food pantry for her daughters, Tiffany, now 17, and Ashley, 4, and signed up for food stamps. “My mother lived off the government,” she said. “It wasn’t something as a proud working woman I wanted to do.”

For most of the year, she did have a $600 government check to help her care for Ashley, who has a developmental disability. But she lost it after she was hospitalized and missed an appointment to verify the child’s continued eligibility. While she is trying to get it restored, her sole income now is $320 in food stamps.

Ms. Bermudez recently answered the door in her best business clothes and handed a reporter her résumé, which she distributes by the ream. It notes she was once a “million-dollar producer” and “deals well with the unexpected.”

“I went from making $180,000 to relying on food stamps,” she said. “Without that government program, I wouldn’t be able to feed my children.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html?emc=eta1

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Thanks so much!

Dear Nola,

In 1985, four women were inspired to create something new and special in Seattle: an organization devoted to helping children in need, and to growing social service philanthropy among their peers.  From this inspired beginning, Northwest Children’s Fund has evolved into one of the Northwest’s premier grant-making organizations, igniting the philanthropic spirit and connecting nearly ten million donor dollars to agencies like yours, who share our mission of ending child abuse and neglect.

I am writing on behalf of the NWCF Board of Directors to invite Helping Hand House to accept a designation as a “Silver Anniversary Partner” as Northwest Children’s Fund celebrates its first quarter century of connecting our community with children in need. You are one of 25 agencies that our Board of Directors has selected from our 300 past grant recipients for this designation.

While the designation does not carry any monetary value, we look forward to commemorating our relationship to date and to highlight the work of both of our organizations.

We hope that you will elect to accept our invitation, so that we may highlight your organization as one of NWCF’s longstanding partners in the fight against child abuse and neglect – and so that you may share with us this year in our celebrations and outreach efforts.

Sincerely,

Victoria Peattie Helm

Executive Director

Needless to say, we accepted the honor! Thank you to Northwest Children’s Fund for their long partnership with our families and mission at Helping Hand House. We’re proud to be serving, and honored to be recognized in such a way.

Tacoma, WA, November 12, 2009 –When Milgard Windows & Doors presented an $8,334 grant to Helping Hand House, the Tacoma-based building products manufacturer brought to life the phrase “lending a hand to a neighbor in need.” Helping Hand house is one of three non-profit agencies sharing a $25,000 grant directed by Milgard from the Masco Corporation Foundation, the charitable arm of Milgard’s parent company, Masco. Other beneficiaries include Simi Valley Samaritan Center, Simi Valley, California, and A New Leaf, Mesa, Arizona.

“Helping Hand House is dedicated to preventing and ending family homelessness right here in Pierce County, a cause particularly relevant in today’s economic environment,” said Milgard President, Gary Gessel. “The organization is the embodiment of the kind of community-based organization Milgard and its parent company, Masco, support through the Masco Corporation Foundation and our own community action team activities.”

“We’re very grateful for this grant from Milgard,” said Nola Renz, executive director of Helping Hand House. “We’ve seen the need for our utility assistance, and transitional, emergency and permanent supportive housing assistance programs quadruple in the last 18 months. Milgard’s gift is a tremendous help as foreclosures on homes and even multi-family apartment buildings in Pierce County have risen to record levels.”

Recipients of the grants were identified in a survey of company employees to determine which non-profit organizations were most responsive to the hunger and homelessness needs in their own communities. The gift continues a long tradition of community support by Milgard family members, Milgard Windows & Doors and the Masco Foundation.

In addition to such corporate gifts, Milgard Matching Gift Community Action Team volunteers participate in community events, fundraising and community improvement activities through volunteerism and monetary donations. More than 80% of Milgard’s Tacoma area employees live in Pierce County, Washington. In 2008, Milgard employees gave more than $86,000 in donations and over 8,000 hours in community service to organizations in the county.
Milgard matches employee donations and provides additional incentive for employee volunteerism by doubling the size of the matching donation when the employee has donated 50 or more hours of time to the same organization in the past 12 months.

http://www.pr.com/press-release/192305

As an organization, we’re so grateful to be here to walk with hundreds of families every year, experiencing the pain of loss and the triumph of overcoming again. The gift of seeing kids eyes light up as load after load of Christmas presents pour through the doorway (provided by incredible volunteers in the community!). We couldn’t be happier to be serving those we serve, loving families and sharing the ups and downs of normalcy after a the crisis mentality fades away… Ending family homelessness. Let this be the year for it! But in the meantime, we’re sharing life with some wonderful people, and that’s something we’re grateful for. Thank you!