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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.”

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.

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!

Generous hearts in that room contributed over $122,000 in gifts and pledges for the day to day operations of our work with homeless families – and we couldn’t be more grateful. We know the lives that this will change – good on you, folks. A true class act, you are. We are honored to be a part of a community like this!

Thank you from the families and staff of Helping Hand House!

Tips for parents
DEBBIE CAFAZZO; The News Tribune

After more than two decades in the kindergarten classroom, teacher Kelly King of Point Defiance Elementary School in Tacoma knows what it takes to get kids off to a good start in school. Here’s her advice for parents:

• Get kids excited about learning. Talk to them about school and how much fun it’s going to be. Even if you had a hard time in school, be enthusiastic with your child.

• Develop your child’s language skills. Talk about what you see when you’re driving. Speak in complete sentences.

• Teach your child to learn to listen by reading stories, attending library story time or making up stories with your child.

• Help your child develop independence. A kindergarten student can open his own juice box, hang up her coat or put away toys. She might not be able to tie her own shoes yet. Don’t worry – buy shoes with Velcro ties.

• Foster the child’s ability to play with others. Get involved with a play group.

• Help encourage fine motor skills development by stringing Cheerios on a pipe cleaner, playing with clothespins or with Lego toys. Those skills will help your child hold a pencil when he goes to kindergarten.

• While a kindergarten child might not know the alphabet, it’s important to foster letter recognition and number sense. When you drive past a store, point to the first letter and say its name out loud. Help count things.

• On the first day of school, keep good-byes cheerful and quick. Don’t come back and peek in the window.

“I’ve never had a child cry for more than five minutes after Mommy and Daddy drove off,” says King.

Please click here to download the 2008 Annual Report as a pdf…

Research finds that neighborhood is key to income mobility
Location keeps some lower on ladder

WASHINGTON – Researchers have found that being raised in poor neighborhoods plays a major role in explaining why African American children from middle-income families are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults.

The Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project caused a stir two years ago by reporting that nearly half of African American children born to middle-class parents in the 1950s and ’60s had fallen to a lower economic status as adults, a rate of downward mobility far higher than that for whites.

This week, Pew will release findings of a study that helps explain that economic fragility, pointing to the fact that middle-class blacks are far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there.

Even as African Americans have made gains in wealth and income, the report found, black children and white children are often raised in starkly different environments. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared to just 6 percent of white children.

Using a study that has tracked more than 5,000 families since 1968, the Pew research found that no other factor, including parents’ education, employment or marital status, was as important as neighborhood poverty in explaining why black children were so much more likely than whites to lose income as adults.

See article here.