Family Promise Interview

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Thank you very much. It’s great to be on with you.

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Plus, could you help us understand, like it’s quite straightforward when you talk about poverty and homelessness. But one thing I’ve learned from doing a lot of these things is it’s not always that easy. Could you help us just clarify what is the problem that we’re talking about that you guys are trying to solve?

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Sure. It fairly promises a US organization or a national organization in the US. We deal very specifically with family homelessness, right. With those families, with children that are experiencing homelessness. And homelessness is just itself a symptom of poverty overall. And when you look at a country like the US, which has, of course, such tremendous wealth, it’s really shocking the amount of poverty that exists. And we look at it again through the lens of our children and families. But in the US, prior to covid, one in six children was living below the poverty line. And that number has only gone up since covid because we’ve seen that there’s obviously been tremendous, tremendous economic devastation from covid and particularly for those who were earning less. You know, it’s an interesting dynamic. The people who were in the professional class have suffered far less economically from covid than those who were in the working class, those who were in poverty or near poverty. But the issue of poverty is so complex in the states because you’ve got this large number of people that are experiencing poverty. You have all of these interventions that are done for it that are inadequate. You have these systemic elements that perpetuate poverty. And what people don’t think about is that there’s profound implications long term.

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When you have poverty, you allow so many children in this country to experience poverty. And as I said, one in six children is below the poverty line of us, which is twenty one thousand dollars a year for a family of a family of four. One in twenty five children lives in a family that is half below the poverty line. That means an income of twelve thousand dollars, which is you that is so out of scale would expect from a wealthy industrialized nation. Allowing that to happen has all of these long term implications right? When you allow children to experience poverty, they don’t graduate high school as much. They don’t go to college as much. They’re more likely to be incarcerated. They’re more likely to have health outcomes, all of which reduce productivity. So you can look at this from the lens of we’ve got to address poverty and homelessness from a human lens because we don’t want people to be suffering. We don’t want children to have the instability of housing and all of those dynamics. But it is also an incredible societal and fiscal malfeasance to allow so many people to experience poverty because you just end up draining resources out of the community and cutting future production.

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Right. A child, a 12 year old who is in poverty today, who then is unattracted where they may not graduate high school. If you think about the economy of 20, 30, how far set back are they and how likely are they to repeat a lot of the challenges of poverty that they grew up with?

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So it’s critically important that we look at this issue nationally and put in the interventions that can intercept that. So we are not just perpetuating these challenges. And the investment that we need to make is a fraction of the overall cost in terms of lost productivity and all these other interventions. We allow so many children to experience poverty. So that’s sort of a kind of a national framing of the issue. And I can go into a lot of detail about how this plays out in different ways.

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Yeah, what I would like to clarify then, you were saying that poverty today has a price for tomorrow. So it actually continues for the whole nation. But we have poverty in the nation. And then I’m hearing that one out of six children was living in poverty conditions before covid. And now that covid stroke and so hard, I guess, what’s the situation right now? If you could help us see that?

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Yeah, there’s all kinds of projections, but.

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By the end of this year, when there’s a moratorium from the CDC on evictions done for health reasons, which is great, but it did not mean that people got relief from their rent. So you staved off a lot of families getting evicted. But by the end of the year, when that moratorium is lifted, they’ll be in arrears. They’ll be very likely to be evicted once that’s allowed again and have significant deficits in their income and be very difficult to find future housing. And that number is anywhere from 30 to to 40 million households that are at risk of eviction. Again, overwhelmingly, the people who are poor because of those workers. Right. You think about what are the jobs that got clobbered by covid hospitality industry, retail, these are all major sectors that employ hourly workers who don’t make a lot, don’t necessarily have a college education. That is where most of the job cuts have come and are on job cuts.

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You had a lot of cut back on wages in terms of hours and so on. So the family was just struggling, right. If they were spending more than 30 percent of your income on rent, you are considered a housing burden, that you’re paying too much of your house. You have many families paying 60 or 70 percent. So a reduction, a slight reduction hours can lead to the loss of income that can lead to the loss of housing because those margins are so thin. So covid has amplified all those existing problems. And then you look at the dynamics of you’re supposed to be supposed to work from home.

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Well, most people who have low paying jobs, hourly jobs, are not in a position where they can work from home. Even if they could work from home, they may not have the connectivity that allows them to do that. Plus, their children are now having to go to school from home.

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And again, if they don’t have that connectivity, if they don’t have those resources, you’re further disadvantaging those children who are not able to access education because everything has to be done remotely. So all of these are compounding factors. And the estimates are that we’re going to go from one in six children to one in five children in poverty just this year because of covid. That’s an increase of millions and millions of children.

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So that really paints a picture of what we’re dealing with here. And what does the family promise fit into the puzzle of at least helping to solve this problem?

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So, you know, as I said, we deal with you specifically with the issue of homelessness. And I’ll take a moment to kind of describe what homelessness means, because I think there’s a common perception of homelessness. And if you ask people what is homelessness, they would show you a picture of a man holding a cup sign on the sidewalk and so on. And that’s certainly a portion of the population experiencing homelessness. But about thirty five percent of the people in the United States who experience homelessness are members of families with children. And those families are not panhandling. They’re not living on the streets. They are living in their cars. They’re paying for their own stays in motels. They’re doubled up with friends and family. They’re staying in places that are not fit for habitation. They’re in shelters. There’s a whole gamut of ways that families experience homelessness. And what ends up happening for those families is that nobody is planning ahead and says, well, I’m going to experience homelessness, let me take care of all these things. Right. You’re trying to stave it off. You’re trying to get money so that you can keep your house, you secure some kind of stable housing, trying to keep your family together. A lot of the adults are working and we’re working two jobs. The kids are going to school. They’re living very normal lives. But with this constant threat of instability, they’re also in fear of becoming homeless and losing their children. So

there’s a lot of difference losing your children to governmental authority. So there’s a lot of different pressures on families when they’re faced with homelessness. So what family does is we essentially have three approaches to that. Our core program is always shelters when a family truly has no other option, that we’re able to provide them with shelter.

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But we also do a lot of work to try to prevent homelessness in the first place. So if we can help a family that is falling behind on its rent, make that up and and work out a plan so that they can stay in their housing or if they become homeless, if we can get them diverted into another living situation so that they do not have to experience homelessness. So those are all prevention programs to keep families from experiencing homelessness and then on the other side of the stabilization programs so that once families are in housing, how do we keep them there? That’s things like employment, financial capability, transportation, childcare. I think of families there. There are families there’s many places in the United States where if you had to if you were a family, you had to choose between losing your house or losing your car. You would be wiser to lose your house because once you lose your car, you lose your family, you go to work, you lose you lose an asset that you have and you’re going to lose your house anyway. So transportation, for example, is a really major issue in so much of this country because there isn’t sufficient mass transit or the existing mass transit isn’t co-located with people in poverty who live or where they work. So you have to look at that myriad of issues. And there’s a maxim and social services say you can’t solve one problem if you don’t solve all the problems. That is our approach. We try to take a holistic approach and identify what empowers this family to long term success.

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Yes, it’s housing, but is it financial capability, budgeting and so on? Is it securing child care? Is it getting entitlements? Is it health and wellness? And how do these all play together? Because we are not looking to get families from homeless to housed. We’re looking to get them stably housed. We’re looking to get them in the position where someday they get that separation from poverty. So they are not constantly at that edge where every asset they have, every dollar they have, has to be spent in some way to ensure that they stay housed.

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Because as I said earlier, the goal we have is we want to be able to have children have the same future regardless of their background and housing status. So child experience homelessness is eight or nine times more likely to repeat a grade. And that’s not inherent to the challenge because of the situation. So if we can get in between that and we can stabilize that family, we want that child to have the same opportunity to graduate high school in the same future that a child who’s never experienced homelessness to have. So it’s all about building that long term stability.

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So if I would quickly summarize, I’m hearing you have three three programs which are important in different aspects of people’s lives. One would be prevention, one would be shelter, where people actually really need help right now with some kind of home.

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And then the last one would be stability to help people for long term success. So, um. Yeah, exactly. As I perceive, family problems are one of the strengths that I really I guess that will be a core strength that you managed to have. Attract so many volunteers helping with that. So you seem to have a lot of volunteers. Tell us more about how that works?

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Yeah, and I actually start with our founding story. So the organization was founded by a woman named Karen Olson, and she worked as a marketing executive for a consumer company in New York, and lived in New Jersey. And in the early eighties, she happened to be walking down the street, saw a woman who clearly was destitute and on an impulse, bought her a sandwich, went over to give her the sandwich, and they ended up having a conversation. And what that illuminated for Karen was that people who are in extreme poverty, people are experiencing homelessness, whether they’re singles or whether their families also need community. They need to be heard. They need to be respected. They need to feel that they have work. They need to be honored as human beings, as all of us are. And that spurred her to create a family promise because a couple of years later, she learned that the number one reason why the division of Youth and Family Services in the state of New Jersey was placing children in foster care was not abuse or neglect. It was simply because their moms had become homeless. This is mid nineteen eighties. So when she heard about this, she said, we’ve got it, we’ve got to do something about that.

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And she started organizing and she went to the faith community because they had a clear mandate. They had resources and she knew it was not going to get solved by the business community, was going to get help from the government. And she started organizing them and they ended up coming up with our model that was heavily volunteer intensive. And what came out of that was by involving so many volunteers and volunteers with very simple things. They make a lasagna, they spend the night, they help somebody with their resume, whatever. A volunteer can kind of contribute to that. But by involving so many volunteers, first and foremost, it kept the costs

down because you didn’t have to have a lot of staff. But more importantly, it gave a sense of community. And we would hear and we still hear all the time. So many families come to our program saying, I had no idea. So many people care. And that is just so powerful. And it is such the essence of family promise that we are more than 200000 people around the country that volunteer in some way or other. And each one doing their little task adds up to an incredible national movement. We served more than one hundred thousand people last year. And again, it was driven by the passion, the compassion, the resources, the ingenuity, the dedication of all of these volunteers.

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And in spirit, I’ll add this to it. So the volunteers are there for cost efficiency. There’s this incredible sense of community. But at the same time, also, when you’re talking about homelessness, you’re talking about poverty, you’re talking about what causes that. Right. And what can we do about those causes? And by engaging so many volunteers, we’re actually mobilizing them to think about the issues and act on them. And so I’ll give an example. If you have a bus that runs until eight o’clock at night in a suburban community, the moms who work at the mall get off work at nine o’clock at night so they can’t take that bus. So they get an Uber. They’ve got to do childcare arrangements. Right. These are working poor moms. The people in that community don’t take that bus. They have no connection to it. They don’t care if the bus runs past 8:00 or not. But once they get involved with family problems and they understand how hard these families are working, how unjust it is that families can experience homelessness to the degree that they do in the United States, they get energized, they get mobilized, and now they care about when the bus run.

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And they can lean in and say, OK, let’s get these buses running late enough so these moms can take the buses back and save time and money and be present for their children. And that’s just a micro example. But that goes around affordable housing, goes around child care. It goes around things like tenant blacklisting. If you got evicted 15 years ago and you live in New Jersey, the landlord can do a background check on you. See that you got evicted fifteen years ago and deny you housing. Now, if you declared bankruptcy 15 years ago, that’s wiped off your record. If you didn’t even get evicted, but you simply had a case against your landlord because they weren’t providing heat. Right. You had a legitimate complaint against your landlord that still shows up in your record. And that new landlord is going to say, oh, you went to housing court, I’m not going to rent to you. So we can mobilize volunteers to become advocates and take a look at issues like that and pressure their legislators to change those rules. So that’s the power of the volunteer network. It is empathy and compassion. It is the service, but it’s also this advocacy.

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You really give justice to the power of volunteers.

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Hearing that it’s not about that single hour, it’s about also not like it’s, of course, but the impact that that has for so many people being part of homelessness, including and understanding the problem. I’m guessing that being homeless, if I would put myself in that position, just getting that support one hour when probably I would feel quite lonely and maybe not feeling that that many people care, I guess that would be from that perspective, so much bigger than. If I’m not in a very exposed position when someone says, I’m going to give you one hour, maybe it doesn’t mean that much, but when you’re exposed, it means a lot. That’s what I’m assuming.

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And it’s reciprocal rights to the volunteer. The families gained so much for the connections, the volunteers. And you have these long standing relationships between families in our program and families that volunteered for years afterwards is, as those families are in their own housing, is successful.

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You build these really powerful human bonds, but the volunteers will tell you I get more out of this than families do know. That I think is technically true. But the fact that they feel that speaks to how powerful is the experience of volunteering. So you cannot you cannot put a value on this volunteer engagement.

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Brings you to humanity being human, that volunteer work can see that. Thank you for taking time to clarify the problem, the whole family promise fits into the puzzle, I would like to end this going into the direction where you want people to do or read more about or what kind of support you guys need to.

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So thank you for asking that, and I’ll kind of classify in a couple of different areas, the first most simple thing is we’re talking about family homelessness, specifically family homelessness, about homeless children. And the Department of Education counts the number of children that experience homelessness in the United States. And one out of 16 children in the United States will experience homelessness in some form or other. By the time they are six years old.

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So if you visualize a kindergarten classroom with 16 kids in it, on average, one of those children will experience

homelessness at some point or other before they move on to the first grade. That is a shocking and horrible statistic. And I think part of the challenge is because family homelessness is invisible. I’ve had people come to me and say I’m really excited to get involved with family crimes because I’ve never met a homeless family before and I really want to help and I appreciate their spirit on that. However, they have met countless homeless families because they have been to McDonald’s, they have been to little league games. They have been in schools. Homeless families are everywhere, but they don’t have big neon signs over their heads saying we are a homeless family. And so people don’t understand the magnitude of the issue. So the first request I would make is that if everybody is learning about the issue, I can go to our website. You can go to your various websites that really talk about the issue of family homelessness and Keun on that statistic. Right. One out of 16 children experiencing homelessness in some form or other, whether it’s staying in a motel because moms in between housing and she’s paying 80 percent of the income for a motel, living in a shelter, sleeping in the back of the car, doubled up with friends and family sleeping on the porch.

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Whatever it is, one out of six children experiences that by the time they’re six years old, we cannot allow that to be. So if we key in on that statistic, then we say, what can we do? What are the actions that we can take? And the first action is obviously find out what’s going on in your community, what are ways you can get involved. Family promises in two hundred communities. We actually want you to get involved, get involved as a volunteer. And we like to say this. You’re qualified to be a volunteer. If you can do one of these three things, eat, sleep or talk, you do all three even better, right? So you can volunteer and then absolutely. Look at ways that you can contribute either in resources or contribute money because. Critical to everything we do. It does not happen and avoid is not simply like, OK, here’s a family, we’re going to give you some food and you’re going to then get your house.

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It takes extensive case management, takes extensive community relations to be able to build those pathways. And the families can go down to get them to long term stability. So that requires case management staff that requires making connections, requires having a place where families can do their resumes, where they can take showers, where they can stay. All of those different elements. So we need awareness. We need volunteerism and we need funding and resources. And so I would ask people to look at how they can do those things with family promise, but also just with any organization in your community that’s addressing family homes, because this is one of the most serious issues in this country that the level of leadership and the level of the issue is this high level of the awareness. Is this right? We need to make those matters because then we can really take some action to solving.

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Thank you for taking time to clarify this issue and just understand.

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The gap that we’re facing, right?

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And I’ll just add one more and one anecdote just to sort of illustrate this and comes from one of our affiliates in California. So there was a family that had a young man, 16 years old or so. He would have been first in his family, going to college. Very smart kid. He wanted to become a math teacher because he wanted to be able to essentially help other under-resourced and disadvantaged populations be able to achieve. And he’s experiencing homelessness. He signs up for the SAT right, which you need to take if you want to go to college. But when he shows up to take a test, he can’t prove his address because he’s homeless. So as much as we sort of think, you know, it’s a meritocracy, there are built-In systemic issues that punish people for poverty and homelessness that keep them from being able to achieve. Now, fortunately, our affiliate was able to step in, get him, get him as an opportunity to test and was able to take the SAT and then go on and go to college and so on. But there are so many systemic issues here that people need to realize. It’s not just as simple as doing one thing. We’ve got to look at the whole system. We’ve got to understand how much we penalize people for experiencing poverty and homelessness.

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