VIDEO: A child’s perspective on homelessness
Direct Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU-oqntaPbY&feature=youtu.be
Article: Housing vouchers could help homeless teens grow, thrive (TNT)
Tacoma News Tribune article about the challenges of serving homeless youth in Pierce County. Thanks for addressing this, Kit.
Housing vouchers could help homeless teens grow, thrive
KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; STAFF WRITER
If you look at one set of federal numbers, there are five homeless teens in Tacoma. If you look at another, there are 250.But if you listen to the people trying to help them, there are hundreds more throughout Pierce County, and most have little hope of getting into decent, stable homes, or growing into decent, stable adults.
Federal counts, which determine where federal money goes, don’t fit the problem. They don’t even fit each other.
Susan Paredes is Tacoma schools’ liaison with the federal program for homeless kids in school. She can name 250 high school students who don’t have homes. They all go to Tacoma schools, and they all meet federal standards for defining a homeless student. Many are couch surfing – sleeping at the homes of friends or relatives until their welcome wears out.
By contrast, federal Department of Housing and Urban Development rules say that if they were crashing with friends on Jan. 27, the night of the annual homeless count, they had a roof and aren’t homeless. Last year, that tally found five kids.
This kind of undercounting sinks efforts to get money to help these young people.
Now experts in social work and housing are teaming up to fix the long-term hole in services for vulnerable youth. They’re brainstorming ways to get these kids into safe homes with counseling, health care, education and training in life skills.
These aren’t easy kids. Some have run away from home. More have been kicked out, fled for their own safety or were abandoned.
“One mother left one of her daughters, left the state, then came back and left the other daughter,” said Cheryl Jones, executive director of Tacoma’s Allen Renaissance.
“I’ve heard many stories of 12-year-olds who are picked up, then leave when they hear they have to be reported to their parents,” said Diane Powers, planner for Pierce County’s mental health and homeless programs. “They say, ‘I’m going back to the camp.’ Many of them are involved in prostitution.”
And many of them, Jones said, will end up at the state’s sexual offender unit for youths with a felony on their juvenile record.
“What our kids are going through is horrific,” she said.
She uses “our kids” in the broad sense, to cover young people who can’t live with their own families and depend on the rest of us to help them toward a decent future.
Even the most basic emergency shelters are expensive, said Troy Christensen of Pierce County Human Services.
“It requires highly trained staff and notification of families,” he said.
But the investment helps cut the risk that young people will harm themselves, have sex or do something else that might leave the provider liable. Expensive programs are powerful deterrents to agencies that are barely getting by and don’t have enough funds targeted at homeless teens.
Work around that, suggested Michael Mirra, executive director of Tacoma Housing Authority. Take money from general funds and use it to get teens settled and aimed at independence.
Tacoma Housing Authority owns houses, and it distributes vouchers that can be used to pay for housing.
“We have homes with up to six bedrooms. We could make a larger single-family home available as a congregate facility that we would not run,” he said.
The young residents could use housing vouchers to pay their rent, and an agency with a good track record could provide the monitoring, counseling and life-skills training in a group-home setting.
Paredes said some homeless students stay in school, but they are minors, entirely on their own and unable to find housing.
The housing authority can help, Mirra said. “If we could support them with housing vouchers, we would count that as very good use of housing dollars.”
This kind of new thinking about solving old problems with existing funds is welcome. It’s opening the possibility of going beyond shelter to help damaged young people grow into productive community members.
These are kids who would love the chance to someday become taxpayers.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677 kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/street
Vote Early, Vote Often: HHH’s Community Garage & Pepsi’s Refresh Everything contest -
Helping Hand House has applied for $250,000 in funding from the Pepsi Refresh Everything project, a unique vote driven grant program. Grants are given on the basis of who gets the most votes by people across the country – people like you. You can vote everyday (please do!). You can vote through Facebook, let people know via Twitter – get the word out and make it happen. And that’s what our families need – for your help to make it happen.
Spread the word – post it to your Facebook wall, email the link – vote early and often.
Transportation is the key
Transportation is a significant key to success for our families, opening doors for stable jobs, childcare, and education. Studies conducted by the Alliance for Youth & Families show that average income increases by 41% with reliable private transportation. In addition, our families can easily save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars by eliminating the need to use public transportation. This gives them the capacity to get and keep a living wage job in communities outside the immediate area in which they live, as well as utilize affordable childcare options and continue to advance their education. Many of our families are living in rural East Pierce County, where there is limited or non-existent public transportation; in effect, without a reliable car, they are stuck at home and on a swift path to again becoming homeless.
The Community Garage
To this end, Helping Hand House has initiated a partnership with Scott Chestain, owner of a local garage Car Clinic, to creatively resolve the transportation issue for the homeless families in Helping Hand House programs. This program, once fully established, has a great potential to be replicable elsewhere throughout the country for other organizations facing similar challenges.
Car Clinic is providing the usage of their shop as an in-kind contribution, as well as leveraging relationships within the community to support some of the most vulnerable families in our region. Families in Helping Hand House programs will have access to a dedicated Auto Repair Technician to perform auto inspections, repairs on vehicles, and routine maintenance.
We anticipate eventually having the ability to receive reliable donated vehicles for the families in our programs, allowing them to experience the full benefits of vehicle ownership.
The Community Garage will also provide an innovative training ground for apprenticeship of adults in our housing programs, helping them acquire job skills for a well-paying career in the auto repair industry.
Deliverables:
* Fund a service and mechanic that provides homeless and low income families a safe reliable resource for work on their vehicles.
* Provide an apprenticeship program for those families wanting to learn the mechanic/automotive technician profession.
* Provides a safety inspection service for family’s vehicles to ensure they are safe for road operation. All of our families have children.
Helping Hand House has applied for a $250,000 grant from Pepsi’s Refresh Everything contest to fund the program – but we need your help!
Grants are given on the basis of who gets the most votes by people across the country – people like you. You can vote everyday. You can vote through Facebook, let people know via Twitter – get the word out and make it happen. And that’s what our families need – for your help to make it happen.
Spread the word – post it to your Facebook wall, email the link – vote early and often.
VIDEO: What makes HHH so unique
Martha Myers explains a bit of what makes Helping Hand House so unique in the way we serve homeless families.
VIDEO: The costs of poverty – and the solutions we’re working on
This is a great video from The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, illustrating powerfully the struggles of those who are in poverty. Here at Helping Hand House, we’re committed to preventing and ending family homelessness - equipping parents and their children to escape poverty through education, financial management, and careers that will support their families.
The premise we work under? No family who goes through our programs should ever be homeless again. Search through our website or come to a House Warming Tour and learn more about our unique and innovative solutions to family homelessness, eradicating poverty one family at a time, breaking cycles for the generation to come.
No family should ever be homeless. We’re working to make it that way.
2009 Annual Report available!
Take a look at the Helping Hand House 2009 Annual Report, with design done pro-bono by Chris Bivins of Spilled Ink Studios. Thanks to all the individuals, churches, groups of all kinds, companies, foundations, and government entities that made it possible to end homelessness for over 250 Pierce County families in 2009. We’d also particularly like to recognize the volunteers who contributed over 1,800 hours of service to the mission, creating quilts, baking cakes, mowing lawns, and so much more.
Enjoy!
Click here to download the report (PDF)
Recommended Article: “99 Weeks Later, Jobless Have Only Desperation” (NY Times)
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Facing eviction from her Tennessee apartment after several months of unpaid rent, Alexandra Jarrin packed up whatever she could fit into her two-door coupe recently and drove out of town.
Ms. Jarrin, 49, wound up at a motel here, putting down $260 she had managed to scrape together from friends and from selling her living room set, enough for a weeklong stay. It was essentially all the money she had left after her unemployment benefits expired in March. Now she is facing a previously unimaginable situation for a woman who, not that long ago, had a corporate job near New York City and was enrolled in a graduate business school, whose sticker is still emblazoned on her back windshield.
“Barring a miracle, I’m going to be in my car,” she said.
Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.
For them, the resolution recently of the lengthy Senate impasse over extending jobless benefits was no balm. The measure renewed two federal programs that extended jobless benefits in this recession beyond the traditional 26 weeks to anywhere from 60 to 99 weeks, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. But many jobless have now exceeded those limits. They are adjusting to a new, harsh reality with no income.
In June, with long-term unemployment at record levels, about 1.4 million people were out of work for 99 weeks or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Not all of them received unemployment benefits, but for many of those who did, the modest payments were a lifeline that enabled them to maintain at least a veneer of normalcy, keeping a roof over their heads, putting gas in their cars, paying electric and phone bills.
(click here to read more)
Pierce County consolodating departments
Not sure what the impact will be on local organizations like ours, but greater efficiency is a great thing!
Pierce County to consolidate departments (Tacoma News Tribune)
Pierce County will consolidate its community services and human services departments as it tries to save money and streamline services.
County Executive Pat McCarthy announced the consolidation this morning.
“We can set up a system that delivers better outcomes, helping more citizens who need our assistance,” McCarthy said in a statement announcing the move. She notified employees in both departments late last week.
The county’s human services department includes services like chemical dependency, mental health and long-term care. Community services covers everything from arts and tourism to homeless assistance and low-income housing.
For several months Deputy Executive Kevin Phelps has led a group studying a possible consolidation of the departments. The group concluded that combining the departments will result in a more effective delivery of services.
Many questions remain to be answered. Among them: how much money, if any, will be saved. The team will spend the next few months creating a detailed implementation plan.
You can view its recommendations to the executive here.
The consolidation of human and community services might be the first phase of a major consolidation of county government. McCarthy ran for executive two years ago on a pledge to improve customer service and find efficiencies in county government.
In addition, the County Council has asked McCarthy to study combining the planning and public works departments. It also has asked the executive to study combining human resources, budget and finance, facilities, risk management and information technology into a new “general services division.”
Reports on those possible consolidations are expected this fall.
