St. Dunstan’s Community Project Fund: Housing Grants

In early 2024, St. Dunstan’s will be giving away $70,000 in grants to help address the housing crisis in Dane County and beyond. These funds were set aside to serve those outside our parish, during our capital campaign for a major renovation in 2018-2019. Read more about this process in last week’s special Enews mailing about it.

We have received four grant applications for these funds. This is the fourth and final proposal we are sharing. Soon we’ll ask members of the congregation to respond to a poll about your preferences among these four organizations. We’ll use ranked choice voting to gather your opinions, and a small team of folks from Vestry, Outreach, and the wider congregation will weigh those data alongside other considerations (like stated congregational values and goals, how much we want to split up the funds, etc.) to finalize recommendations to the Vestry by the end of January. Grants will be announced on February 1st.

Fourth Application: Helping a Family Move into Stable Housing 

Organization: The Road Home 

Project title: Heart Room Program

From the Road Home’s website: 
The Road Home Dane County is committed to ending the issue of family homelessness in our community. We do this by developing long-term relationships with homeless families with children that change lives. We work with families, not only to relieve the immediate crisis of homelessness, but also to build skills, resources and relationships that set the stage for long-term success. To accomplish our mission, we rely on the help and support of individuals, congregations and businesses throughout Madison and beyond. We believe that for the greater good of our city and for human kind, we can and should join together to make a difference because every child deserves a home.

The Road Home provides a variety of types and levels of supportive services and stable housing programs that best fit families’ needs and help them be successful. Over 90% of our families who could reach one year in stable housing do so. We also seek to decrease racial housing disparities that exist in our community. We work together with partners such as other nonprofits, government agencies, United Way of Dane County, people with lived experiences of homelessness, volunteers, businesses, congregations and donors to create solutions that work.

Our History
The Road Home Dane County (then known as Interfaith Hospitality Network of the Madison Area) opened our doors on April 26th, 1999 as an overflow shelter for families who could not be served by the existing shelters. In the years that followed, The Road Home played a growing role in securing funds and support for affordable housing and providing case management to help families find and maintain that housing. In 2018, we phased out shelter to focus on housing and support services. A 501(c)(3) organization, we currently operate ten housing programs and serve over 200 families with children in Dane County each year.

The Need 

(Text from The Road Home’s application) 

Heart Room is specifically designed to support families that other housing programs in our community typically do not. The vast majority of supportive housing programs in our community enroll individuals and families through a uniform screening and prioritization process. Unfortunately, the eligibility criteria underlying this process excludes many families at high risk of homelessness from receiving support. Families with young children living in precarious “doubled-up” housing arrangements and those with mixed immigration status are particularly underserved by the current system.

Heart Room was intentionally designed to fill this gap in our community. It is also important to note that Heart Room is at the very forefront of the faith group-nonprofit partnership strategy identified as a priority for expansion and replication in the current Dane County Community Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness.

Families served in Heart Room are low-income or extremely low-income, and upon enrollment they are experiencing homelessness, at high risk of falling into homelessness, or severely burdened by their current housing costs. Relative to the Madison population, families also are much more likely to be BIPOC/non-white, have limited English proficiency, have mixed immigration status, have a caregiver with a long-term disability, and have a caregiver or child with a serious mental health concern. To date, Heart Room has served 24 families including 70 children.

Read a Heart Room story from 2019 here!

The Program 

Heart Room is a three-year supportive housing program that provides flexible rental subsidies and wraparound case management services to families with young children experiencing homelessness or severe housing instability. Heart Room began on a pilot basis in 2018 as a partnership between Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ, The Road Home Dane County, Joining Forces For Families, and RISE Wisconsin’s Early Childhood Initiative. Heart Room currently serves eleven (11) families living in Madison’s South and Southwest neighborhoods.

The Road Home Dane County provides housing case management to families for their three years in the program. This includes housing search, assistance with housing applications, lease support, and ongoing case management once the family is stably housed. RISE Wisconsin and Joining Forces for Families provide ongoing support regarding early childhood development, parent/child relationships, and other needed community resources. We wholeheartedly believe that this collaborative model is essential in helping families move from homelessness to safe, stable housing.

As families complete the three years in Heart Room and phase out of the program, this creates openings for new families to join Heart Room. All referrals for Heart Room come directly from our partners at Joining Forces for Families and RISE Wisconsin.

Heart Room provides financial resources to prevent vulnerable families from experiencing homelessness, but the program also provides wraparound support that empowers families to achieve self-identified goals and become self-sufficient. Core goals include increasing family earned income, improving parental financial literacy, increasing children’s engagement in school and community resources, expanding job opportunities through workforce training programs, and even home ownership. Moreover, the majority of families served by Heart Room to date have mixed immigration status, which creates additional – and discriminatory – barriers to economic opportunity and access to public resources.

Grant Request: $21,000

In 2024, there are three families who will be graduating from the program. In order to fill these openings upon graduation, we are working to secure funding to provide three years of rental assistance to families who will enroll in the program next year. The full three years of rental assistance per family is $21,000 ($7,000 per family per year, over three years). Thus, the Heart Room team is aiming to raise $63,000 to support three new families in the program. Our requested grant amount of $21,000 will allow us to provide three years of rental subsidy to support one new family.