Items needed:

• Sofas (no sofa beds)
• Love seats
• Arm chairs (no recliners)
• Twin, Double or Queen-size bed frames and mattresses (no King)
• Coffee tables
• End tables
• Dressers
• Kitchen tables and chairs

Pickup dates:
November 30, December 5, December 12, 2009 (other days may be possible, please call for information)

Pickup area:
Outer boundaries for pickup are Broomfield and Golden to the north and west, Parker and Aurora to the south and east. 

If you have any of the above items and would like to make a donation, please call Judy Mugler at (303) 623-6514 or email Judy with a list of items you would like to date, your full address and phone number. A volunteer will be in touch with you about pickup.

Please share this with family, friends and colleagues. Thank you!

Spending limits: $100 for ages 0-5; $125 for ages 6-10; and $150 for ages 11-adult
Deadline 1: December 2-4, 2009
Deadline 2: December 11, 14 or 15, 2009

This program is for families who are participating in either our emergency or transitional housing program. Donors are assigned to a family and receive a short family history along with a list of holiday needs and desires. We provide spending limits to ensure all families, many of whom are neighbors, receive gifts of similar value. Household items and clothing make smart, practical gifts. Toys without batteries and personal items that can be used every day are also great choices. In order for children to see their parents as the givers of gifts rather than recipients of charity, donors are asked not to wrap children’s gifts. Instead, please provide wrapping paper and tape so that parents may wrap for their own children. Parents’ gifts may be wrapped. Gifts should be delivered to our office at 999 Decatur Street in Denver by the deadline.

If adopting a specific family is not feasible for you, please consider donating generic gifts to be given to our client families who enter our program too close to the holidays to be assigned a donor. A generic gift list is available upon request.

Another option, always needed and appreciated, is a monetary gift to Family HomeStead to assist client families with housing and case management after the holidays have passed.

We wish you a peaceful and happy holiday season. Thank you for caring!

To adopt a family or for more information about how you can help during the holidays, please email Judy Mugler, or call (303) 623-6514. Please indicate which delivery date you can meet.

Denver Post | November 7, 2009

By Jim Abrams
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama signed a $24 billion economic-stimulus bill into law Friday, giving tax incentives to prospective homebuyers and additional jobless benefits to those idled by the business slump.

The bill-signing came a day after the House, displaying rare bipartisan agreement over the troubling employment picture nationally, voted 403-12 to pass the measure. The Senate had approved it unanimously Wednesday.

The White House said the law, which also includes tax cuts for struggling businesses, builds on provisions in the $787 billion stimulus package enacted in February to avert an economic meltdown.

“The need for such a measure was made clear by the jobs report that we received this morning,” Obama said, citing a government report Friday that the jobless rate hit 10.2 percent last month, the highest since 1983.

For their part, lawmakers stressed that the fourth unemployment-benefit extension in the past 18 months was necessary because initial signs of economic recovery have not been reflected in the job market. About a third of the 15 million people out of work have gone at least six months without a job.

The law provides another 14 weeks of benefits to all out-of-work people who have exhausted their benefits or will do so by the end of the year, estimated at nearly 2 million. Those in states where the jobless rate is 8.5 percent or above get an additional six weeks.

The Labor Department reported Friday that employers shed another 190,000 jobs in October. Obama said job creation traditionally lags behind economic growth, but he acknowledged that is small comfort to those seeking work.

“So although it will take time and it will take patience, I am confident that our economy will recover,” Obama said. “I’m confident that we’re moving in the right direction. And I promise that I won’t rest until America prospers once again.”

The extra 20 weeks could push the maximum a person in a high-unemployment state could receive to 99 weeks, the most in history.

Unemployment checks generally are for about $300 a week.

The tax credits, added by the Senate, center on extending the popular $8,000 credit for first-time homebuyers that was included in the stimulus package. The credit, which was to expire at the end of this month, will be available through next June as long as the buyer signs a binding contract by the end of April.

The program is expanded to include a $6,500 credit for existing homeowners who buy a new place after living in their current residence for at least five years.

Original article

15th Annual “For the Love of Family” Gala
Denver Museum of Nature and Science
February 6, 2010
6:30 p.m.

An elegant night of entertainment, dinner and auction presented by the HomeSteaders of Family HomeStead. This gala event will take place in the Leprino Family Atrium of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The evening will include a cocktail reception, silent and live auctions, musical entertainment, access to the wildlife exhibit, and an elegant dinner and dessert buffet.

Each year HomeSteaders raises critically needed dollars to support Family HomeStead’s work. The current fundraising climate presents unique challenges, and HomeSteaders are “stepping up” our efforts to meet that challenge. In 2009, “For the Love of Family” raised $37,000 to support Family HomeStead. Our goal is $50,000 in 2010. We cannot do it without your help.

Event sponsorship and underwriting are key to the gala’s success. Please consider what you or your company can do to make “For the Love of Family” 2010 a huge success. For more information, please visit the HomeSteaders website or contact Leah Langerman at (303) 596-5424 or Miki Miller at (303) 884-4271. We anticipate a sell-out crowd for this exclusive evening, and invite you to join us.

On behalf of the homeless families we serve, we thank you for your support.

………………………………………

Family HomeStead is a Denver Enterprise Zone (DEZ) agency. Gifts of $250 or more may be eligible for a DEZ tax credit of 25 percent on the donor’s Colorado state income tax.

David Maxwell/New York Times

New York Times | October 18, 2009

By Peter S. Goodman

CLEVELAND — The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished houseplants on the floor. She used her backyard as a restroom.

The second night, she stayed with a friend, and so it continued for more than a year: Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.

In the Midwest, foreclosure played a role for 15 percent of newly homeless people, according to the survey, reflecting soaring rates of unemployment — Ohio’s reached 10.8 percent in August — and aggressive lending to people with damaged credit.

At a shelter for women and children run by the West Side Catholic Center in Cleveland, where Ms. West now lives, foreclosure accounted for zero arrivals in 2007, the center’s executive director, Gerald Skoch, said. Last year, two cases emerged. This year, the number has already reached four.

Similar increases have been reported at shelters in California, Michigan and Florida, where a combination of joblessness and the real estate bust have generated unusually severe rates of foreclosure.

Most people who become homeless because of foreclosure had been low-income renters whose landlords stopped making their mortgage payments, leaving them scrambling for new housing with little notice and scant savings, according to the survey and interviews with shelters.

But in recent months, there has been a visible increase in the number of former homeowners showing up in shelters. Like Ms. West, most have landed there after months trying to stave off that fate.

“These families never needed help before,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House in Santa Ana, Calif. “They haven’t a clue about where to go, and they have all sorts of humiliation issues. They don’t even know what to say, what to ask for.”

Many start off camping out in cars, particularly in warmer places.

“We’ve seen a rise in people sleeping in their cars,” said Rick Cole, city manager in Ventura, Calif., which recently allowed car-camping in designated areas. “Some are foreclosed former homeowners, and some couldn’t afford their rent. People will give up their house before they give up their car.”

Those with means try to rent homes or apartments, though tainted credit often makes that impossible. Growing numbers are landing in motels that rent by the week, cramming whole families into single rooms and using hot plates as kitchens. But as unemployment expands, many are losing the wherewithal to remain.

Many take refuge with families and friends, occupying extra bedrooms, basements and attics. But such hospitality rarely lasts.

So, as lean times endure and paychecks disappear, homeless shelters are absorbing those who have run out of alternatives.

For Ms. West, whose youthful appearance belies her age, in her mid-50s, the nights spent on couches in other people’s homes were uncomfortably familiar. She grew up an only child in a housing project in Neptune, N.J., where her mother slept in the lone bedroom, and she occupied a pullout sofa in the living room.

“I’ve always had this dream of doing better,” she said. “I always wanted to own my own house.”

She realized that dream shortly after arriving in Cleveland with her husband and two children in the early 1990s. At first, they rented. But one fall afternoon, Ms. West found herself on a block lined with leafy trees in Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood east of the Cuyahoga River that was a magnet for middle-class black families like hers. Red brick homes with wooden porches sat on ample lots. Public schools were a few blocks away.

When she saw an ad in the Sunday paper offering a house on that very block, she bought it for $45,000; for the $9,000 down payment she used the savings her mother had left her when she died. She and her husband assumed the mortgage from the previous owner, with affordable payments of less than $400 a month.

Ms. West then had a job as a maintenance worker at an apartment complex for about $9 an hour. Her husband earned about $10 an hour as a truck driver. As the years passed, they added shrubbery to the front yard and photos of children’s birthday parties to the walls.

“I thought that was going to be my house,” she said.

She tapped her inheritance to buy another house on nearby Union Street, paying $15,000 in cash for a light-blue, vinyl-sided A-frame. She turned the house into a home for five homeless people. She did their laundry, reminded them to take their medications and cooked meals, while collecting payments of up to $750 a person each month from the agencies that placed them.

Over the years, Ms. West and her husband spent more than they earned. They used credit cards to finance restaurant meals. They bought a new S.U.V.

At the group home, Ms. West’s compensation slipped as the state limited benefit payments. Yet every month brought the same thicket of bills — water, electricity, gas, plus food for the people under her charge.

In 2001, Ms. West and her husband took out a $67,000 mortgage on the Union Street house — which had increased considerably in value — to refinance high-interest debts, assuming payments of nearly $700 a month.

Two years later, her husband left her.

“It just took the life out me,” she said. “I was in a very bad state, a very depressed situation. Things just kind of went downhill. I just didn’t care anymore.

By 2005, she was broke. She sold the brick house to her cousin, disbanded the group home and moved in. She paid what bills she could through temporary jobs as a signature collector for petition drives. But as many months passed without work, the bills piled up past due.

By the next year, terse letters were coming from the mortgage company — notices of delinquency, then threats of foreclosure. Much of the neighborhood was in a similar state. Broken windows sat unrepaired at a two-story apartment block across the street, where tattered curtains flapped in the breeze. The city boarded up abandoned homes to deter vagrants, drug addicts and prostitutes.

Ms. West wrote to her mortgage company, seeking lower payments. But with tainted credit and no full-time job, she was not a candidate for a deal. Fliers beckoned with relief as companies offered to negotiate with her lender for lower payments. But when she called, the companies demanded upfront payments as high as $500.

“I told them, ‘if I had that money, I wouldn’t be going into foreclosure,’ ” she said.

In the spring of 2008, Ms. West accepted an offer from the mortgage company: move out, hand over the keys and collect $2,500. She sold what furniture she could and put the rest on the street — tables, beds, a couch.

Her uncle had said she could stay with him for a while. But when she called him to say she was on the way, he told her that his girlfriend was uncomfortable with the arrangement. Ms. West’s daughter was in a cramped rented house with her boyfriend and her two children. Her son was in a rooming house.

So Ms. West, a stylish woman with a penchant for shiny lipstick and glittering jewelry, wound up camping in her car. She listened to the radio to drown out the voices of prostitutes trawling the street. She meditated. (“Just blank out everything in your mind,” she said. “Just go to a place that’s peaceful, like a beach.”) She prayed.

“It was scary,” she said. “Here I am, alone, and I don’t have nowhere to go.”

The next day, she moved in with a friend, remaining there for about three months. For several more months, she stayed with the cousin who had bought her old brick house and was living there with her husband and seven children. Toys lay scattered across the floor. The walls vibrated with music, television and the sounds of children. She lay awake on the couch, a vagabond in the one place that had once felt so solid.

“I was losing my mind,” she said.

She was grateful to be inside — particularly during the Cleveland winter — yet never comfortable or stable enough to plan beyond the next day.

“You know in the back of your mind that people don’t really want you there,” she said.

Sometimes, she lived out of her car, spending days at the public library, where she washed up in the restroom and used a computer to scan meager job listings.

Finally, a woman she met on the street took her in and helped her formulate a recovery plan. She signed up for food stamps. She enrolled at a community college in a three-month, state-financed training program that would give her a certificate for an entry-level job in biotechnology, putting her in position to earn as much as $16 an hour.

In September, she got a bed at the homeless shelter, reluctantly accepting that she needed her own space to re-establish her life.

“I never wanted to go to the shelter because of the stigma,” she said. “I’m a very independent person. I felt like I got myself into this situation, and I’ve got to get myself out. But I knew I couldn’t just keep going back and forth and staying with these people and not moving forward with my life.”

She sleeps in a twin bed with a flower-print duvet, in a small room painted lavender. Her plants line the windowsill. She keeps to herself, reading motivational books, as she prepares to start classes next month.

She is working again, taking care of senior citizens in their homes part time, and saving money.

By December, she will exhaust the shelter’s 90-day limit, so she is hurrying to line up a house to rent while arranging a subsidy through the West Side Catholic Center.

She is still shaken by the past and anxious about the future, but she is again looking ahead

“I do want to eventually own a house again,” she said. “That’s the American dream. That’s what everybody wants.”

Original article

The violence subsided for awhile but then re-emerged. Two years later, when her husband threatened her with a gun, Priscilla realized that she dared not live with him any longer. She called the police and her husband went to jail on a threats charge. Priscilla quickly found, however, that she could not support the family on her meager income, and they were evicted from their apartment. At about the same time, her husband was acquitted on the threats charge and was released from jail. Fearing her husband and with nowhere to live, Priscilla and the children once again sought refuge in a safehouse. It was the safehouse that referred her to Family HomeStead.

Because she is working, Priscilla qualified for Family HomeStead’s Transitional Housing Program. She has continued working full-time at her low-wage, personal care assistant job. She is a valued employee, and her employer has offered to help put her through school to qualify her for a promotion. She plans to start school soon.

If a client is very needy, safehouses will sometimes provide continued counseling after a family moves to Family HomeStead housing. In Priscilla’s case, she is at a point in her life where that has not been necessary. She is focused on finding permanent housing, enhancing her position at work, and putting the years of abuse behind her.

Priscilla meets with her Family HomeStead case manager regularly and together they have developed a plan to stabilize her family’s life. With the support of her case manager, she has been able to keep her children enrolled in the same school they had been attending. She has also filed for divorce and has begun receiving child support payments. Making the most of her case manager’s assistance, Priscilla has thoroughly investigated future housing options and has several choices available to her when she completes our transitional program.

Priscilla is focused on providing a safe environment and bright future for her children. She feels confident she is on the right track.

The kids, all boys, ranging in age from 6-18, sat quietly in the lobby while their mother met with a case manager. The kids did not speak a word of English, but their mother spoke very well, in fact, she spoke 8 languages. Anisa and the kids were recent arrivals to the U.S., coming as refugees from a war-torn country. When they came to Family Homestead they had recently been evicted from their rental after a refugee organization could no longer pay the monthly rent they had covered for 8 months. In Africa, Anisa had been a secretary and language tutor, but she had been unable to work since coming to the U.S. because her youngest son suffered with severe health problems and could not attend school on a regular basis. During the initial intake with the case manager at Family HomeStead, Anisa cried several times, stating that she thought things would be better once they got to the U.S., but they continued to struggle. She said that sometimes she thought, maybe, they should go back.

Anisa and the case manager developed a case plan focusing on stabilizing her son’s medical condition, going to school for a trade that would support the family and to secure more permanent housing. The family was placed in emergency housing and was visited a couple of times per week by their case manager. Initially, Anisa was not comfortable with doing things on her own, as she was accustomed to being escorted while outside the home. In the beginning, the case manager accompanied her to apply for housing and other benefits, but eventually she found other supports and was ultimately able to do more things on her own. It certainly was not easy for Anisa, and still, some days, she thought that things might be easier in her home country. But things got better. She was able to get SSI benefits for her youngest son and he was able to get the specialists he needed to get his medical condition under control. With him stabilized and attending school regularly, Anisa was able to attend school for computers and volunteered in an office as part of a community training program. Also, during her time in the emergency housing program, Anisa’s case manager helped her to apply for a special program through the housing authority. Just as her time in emergency housing expired, Anisa was accepted into public housing and moved into a home of her own.

There are still days of struggle where Anisa longs for her home country, but now the “American dream” seems a little more within reach.

It was mid-February and I was behind schedule for a meeting with one of Family HomeStead’s case managers. I was to shadow her as she performed interviews for admission and follow-up visits. But the weather; the cold dark clouds, smog, or fog (whatever the news was calling it that day) hovered, thick like the enclosed smoke of a thousand cigars.

To no avail, I set the windshield wipers to their fastest speed, but coupled with the back splashing of the cars in front of me and the amount of rain falling, the wipers might as well have been off. Who knew which was better; defroster on or window down? Either way, the cars and trucks were swaying in the slush that covered the highways like a wet cottony mess. I was ten minutes late and counting.

I arrived at the office frazzled and showering greetings of, “Can you believe this weather?” I was led into a side office, where I met a young boy of 11 or 12 sitting, or trying to sit still, while he and his mother went through their entry interview for one of Family HomeStead’s programs. His legs wiggled and bounced under the table as his mother told their history filled with life-altering events. They were finally leaving a string of motels and homes of relatives, and ready for a fresh start in their own place. I glanced out the window, remembering my frustrations of trying to get there on time, and could only imagine their journey. Their possessions packed away in the car and in storage, with her two children, whose school was closed that day, unenxpectedly along for each meeting. But she made it and her children were able to watch their mother change their circumstances for the better. The young boy’s untamed grin, showing itself sporadically throughout the interview, seemed fastened, bright and brilliant, when he was led into their new home and picked out which room would be his.

Later we headed across town to visit existing Family HomeStead residents. It was definitely snowing this time around. We met with a woman whose two sons were celebrating their snow day with ice cream bars and a movie. She sat with a sigh, as if it were the first time she had sat down all day, and spoke of her husband’s health condition, a sudden loss of hearing that led to the loss of his job. This played a role in the family’s seeking out the help of Family HomeStead. She and her case manager went over her progress on certain channels explored in preparation for a new chapter to begin a chapter beyond this program. Some promising, some dead ends, and others would simply require more time.

Throughout our visit her boys would run in, one after the other, with individual hugs and “I love you’s” for her. She hugged them tight adn sent them back to their movie, but her eyes lingered on them as they left the room. “This is not easy,” she said. “It’s like a job in itself.” She glanced up at a window; said nothing of the weather, nothing of the snow or sleet or rain. “But we’re making it happen,” she said. “Some days, I don’t know how, but then we pass another hurdle and we know it’s possible.”

With half the visits over, I walked outside and decided to say nothing of the white blanket that tightly wrapped my car. Instead I looked over my shoulder at the apartment community that was helping to hold families together and thought of the case worker whose work wasn’t done. No one else seemed to notice the weather that day because they were too busy noticing the lives changing around them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wenonah Clayton is the office manager for the Apartment Association of Metro Denver (AAMD). A New England native, she worked in the non-profit sector in both Connecticut and Virginia before moving to Colorado. As AAMD’s liaison to the Community Outreach Committee, she is heavily involved in planning their annual Spring Clean as well as the Charity Auction to benefit Family HomeStead. She comments, “To be able to work on outreach programs like that of Family HomeStead has given my job an added value and insight that I highly…cherish.”

Fred R. Conrad/New York Times

New York Times | September 5, 2009

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades up from the C’s she got last spring — a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel.

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.

The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.

Still, Charity said of her last semester, “I couldn’t go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff,” and she often nodded off in class.

Charity and her brother, Elijah Carrington, 6, were among 239 children from homeless families in her district as of last June, an increase of 80 percent over the year before, with indications this semester that as many or more will be enrolled in the months ahead.

While current national data are not available, the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group.

There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.

With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.

“It’s hard enough going to school and growing up, but these kids also have to worry where they’ll be staying that night and whether they’ll eat,” said Bill Murdock, chief executive of Eblen-Kimmel Charities, a private group in Asheville that helps needy families with anything from food baskets and money for utility bills to toiletries and a prom dress.

“We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don’t cry,” Mr. Murdock said.

Since 2001, federal law has required every district to appoint a liaison to the homeless, charged with identifying and aiding families who meet a broad definition of homelessness — doubling up in the homes of relatives or friends or sleeping in motels or RV campgrounds as well as living in cars, shelters or on the streets. A small minority of districts, including Buncombe County, have used federal grants or local money to make the position full time.

The law lays out rights for homeless children, including immediate school placement without proof of residence and a right to stay in the same school as the family is displaced. Providing transportation to the original school is an expensive logistical challenge in a huge district like Buncombe County, covering 700 square miles.

While the law’s goals are widely praised, school superintendents lament that Congress has provided little money, adding to the fiscal woes of districts. “The protections are important, but Congress has passed the cost to state and local taxpayers,” said Bruce Hunter, associate director of the American Association of School Administrators.

Fairfax County, Va., where the number of homeless students climbed from 1,100 in June 2007 to 1,800 last spring, has three social workers dedicated to the homeless and is using a temporary stimulus grant to assign a full-time transportation coordinator to commandeer buses, issue gas cards and sometimes call taxis to get the children to their original schools.

Like Fairfax County, the Asheville area looks prosperous, drawing tourists and retirees, but manicured lawns, million-dollar homes and golf courses mask the struggles of many adults working at low-paying jobs in sales and food service.

Emily Walters, the liaison to the homeless for the Buncombe County schools, is busy as school begins, providing backpacks and other supplies and signing children up for free breakfasts and lunches. But her job continues through the school year as other families lose their footing and those who had concealed their status, because of the stigma or because they were not aware of the benefits, join the list.

Sometimes it includes driving families in crisis to look at prospective shelters — a temporary solution at best, Ms. Walters said. When the county receives a two-year stimulus grant next month, she said, she hopes there will be more money to help people avoid eviction or pay security deposits for new rentals.

The evening before school began, Ms. Walters drove 45 minutes to an RV campground to deliver a scientific calculator and other essential school supplies to Cody Curry, 14, who lives with his mother, Dawn, and his brother, Zack, 11, in a camper. Mrs. Curry had to downsize from a trailer, she said, when her work as a sales clerk was cut to two days a week.

The first day of school, Ms. Walters drove to a men’s rescue shelter in the city to take Nate Fountain, 18, to high school. Nate said his parents kicked him out of the house last spring, during his senior year, because he was not doing his school work and was drinking and using drugs. With Ms. Walters’s help, he said, he expects to finish high school this semester and study culinary arts at a community college.

“I spend a lot of time just making sure the kids stay in school,” Ms. Walters said.

The busing service was especially valued by Leslie Laws, who was laid off from her job in customer service last year and lost her rental apartment.

Ms. Laws and her 12-year-old son are staying in a women’s shelter in Asheville, far from his former school. He is deeply involved with activities like chorus. Now he must catch the bus at 6:05 a.m. and ride one and a half hours each way.

Educators and advocates for the homeless across the country said that in the current recession, the law had made a difference, minimizing destructive gaps in schooling and linking schools with social welfare agencies.

Charity Crowell, despite her vow to bring up her grades, may be in store for another rough semester. Her stepfather works long hours delivering food on commission, but business is poor. Her mother, Katrina, wants to look for a job, but that is difficult without a car.

Food stamps help, but by the second half of each month the family is mostly eating “Beanee Weenees and noodles,” Ms. Crowell said. As school resumed in late August, the family was facing eviction from the $475-a-month trailer and uncertain about what to do next.

Original article

Homeless children are helped most by efforts which support their parents in taking control of, and responsibility for, family life.

………………………………………

Elsewhere on this site you will read the stories of families whose inspiring strength drives them out of the crisis of homelessness. Family HomeStead’s emphasis on the strength, integrity, and independence of the families we house serves to remove obstacles and enhance their motivation to succeed. But today the environment facing low-income families is bleak, and that makes our job more difficult.

Denver’s Road Home (the Mayor’s Plan to End Homelessness) is a program whose objective is to end homelessness in ten years. There are seven years left. Much has been accomplished. Housing units have been built and services have been expanded. Yet it is obvious to anyone who is paying attention that homelessness is increasing. Something is wrong.

That conclusion was reinforced last month with the release of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) annual nationwide homeless assessment. HUD’s study measured changes in the number of homeless between 2007 and 2008, before the height of the economic crisis. Family homelessness grew by 9%.

“The typical homeless person has changed to become less focused on the chronically homeless or single-individual homeless to somebody who is part of a family, whether it be a mother or a father or a child in a homeless family,” HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said. “I think what that tells us is that the economic crisis is forcing more families who had previously been well-housed into homelessness.” Donovan acknowledged that the data do not reflect “the great many more families who were living on the edge, doubling up with friends and family members, and struggling to stay out of the shelters and off the streets.”

According to the National Center on Family Homelessness, children experiencing homelessness (compared to all children) have:

• four times as many respiratory infections,
• twice as many ear infections,
• five times more gastrointestinal problems,
• four times the incidence of asthma,
• high rates of obesity due to nutritional deficiencies,
• three times t he rate of emotional and behavioral problems,
• four times the rate of delayed development, and they have
• twice the incidence of learning disabilities.

By age 12, 83% of homeless children have been exposed to at least one serious violent event, and almost 25% have personally witnessed acts of violence within their own families.

The “green shoots” we’ve been hearing about seem to be growing only in the financial sector (Goldman Sachs earned second-quarter profits of $3.44 billion, NY Times) while bypassing the job markets almost entirely. (U.S. employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate hit a 26-year high of 9/5%, Business Week.) According to a June 2009 report by t he Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, net job losses since the start of the recession total six million. Thhere is currently one job available for every six unemployed workers. And unemployment benefits will expire this fall for many that lost their jobs early in the recession.

The weak job market isn’t the only factor causing more famiies to become homeless: “Some of the first homeless vets that walked into our office were s ingle moms,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “When people think of homeless vets, they don’t think of a Hispanic mother and her kids. The new generation of veterans is made up of far more women.” (Boston Globe)

Family HomeStead has not been immune to the economic disaster. Our 2008 year-end appeal was down by about 15% and our 2009 fundraising event was off slightly as well. Despite the real possibility of lower revenues, the Family HomeStead Board has responded positively. We have taken advantage of lower rental rates in the local multi-family apartment market by leasing units that will allow us to house more families. And the board has authorized staff to increase advocacy efforts on behalf of all our clients, especially with respect to assuring that they are able to access public benefitis for which they are eligible – such as food stamps, Medicaid, and daycare assistance. Public benefits offices have been flooded with applicants who have lost jobs.

You will read on this site about a few of the individuals and organizations that support our work with homeless families. There are many, many more that remain anonymous. Almost everyone has been negatively affected by our “Great Recession.” The temptation to think only of self-preservation is strong. Yet many have become more generous than ever. At times like these, true community spirit and compassion show through.

We deeply appreciate the help we receive. But in this crisis we must urge you to do more. Please contact your elected officials and representatives and express your support for measures that you believe will ease the suffering of the most vulnerable among us, and pave the way toward an economic recovery with opportunity for all. Homeless children are helped most by efforts that support their parents in taking control of, and responsibility for, family life. Jobs that pay a living wage are a good start. Medical coverage for the forty million currently uninsured, and the 14,000 people who lose coverage every day, would also make a huge difference to those who fight c onstantly to meet basic needs.

Thank you for caring about the struggles of homeless families.

– Les Jones