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.

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, and we’ll be sharing about the projects and organizations over the weeks ahead. In mid-January we will begin a parish feedback project where members and friends of St. Dunstan’s can share their thoughts about where you would most like to see our funding go. Please read, reflect, and take notes! (And if you haven’t taken a good look already, look back at our first two applications, from the Ho-Chunk Community Housing Authority and Own It! Building Black Wealth!)

Third Application: Housing Stability in Middleton & Beyond

Organization: WayForward Resources (formerly MOM)

Project title: Housing Stability Program

WayForward Resources’ mission is to bring our community together to create food and housing security through action and advocacy. Our vision is a community where everyone has the stability to thrive. WayForward Resources has more than 40 years of experience in creating food and housing security through action and advocacy. We help over 6,500 people annually access food and remain in housing. 60% of the households we serve are families with children. The community using our services is diverse: 29% Black, 27% white, 23% Latinx, 8% multi-race, and 14% other or unreported.

WayForward Resources (formerly Middleton Outreach Ministry) was established in 1980 by members of local  churches, including St. Dunstan’s. St. Dunstan’s continues to support WayForward on a regular basis, and many members are active volunteers.

At WayForward Resources, leadership and staff acknowledge the ongoing structural disparities caused by racism in our country and community. Structural racism creates barriers to well-being and progress, experiences of racial trauma, and decreased access to food and housing. This is intensified for people who are English language learners. We work to reduce harm and enact change by fulfilling an immediate need for food and housing, including voices of lived experience, and advocating for racial equity in these areas. We envision a strong community where race-based barriers to opportunity do not exist, and race no longer predicts someone’s stability.

Read a recent guest column by WayForward Resources Executive Director Ellen Carlson about the increased demand on food pantries.

The Need 

(Text from WayForward Resource’s application) 

Families and individuals are challenged to find housing they can afford, maintain that housing and meet food and other basic needs, in turn increasing the challenges for WayForward and other nonprofits to keep up with the demand. In the last year, WayForward provided 603 households in West Madison, Middleton and Cross Plains with an average of $650 for rent, utilities, and transportation assistance to stay in their homes and out of the shelter system. Those households include almost 1,000 children.

The cost of housing locally continues to rise at record levels. A recent national study found that rent prices in Madison jumped 30% since March 2020 – the fastest-rising rent of any major city in the United States. 44% of renters in Dane County pay more than 30% of their monthly income in rent.

Now more than ever, WayForward programs are what allow people in our community to stay in their homes. Nearly all households WayForward serves are below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines.

The Program 

Our Housing Stability Program is one of the few homelessness prevention programs in the area, filling a gap in services for families and individuals currently in housing who are at risk of eviction. WayForward offers rent assistance and case management before families and individuals become homeless, helping them avoid the trauma and well-documented negative outcomes associated with homelessness, especially for children.

(Note that WayForward Resources also runs the Connections housing program, which focuses on families who are experiencing “doubled-up” homelessness.) 

The expiration this year of federal food and housing assistance programs has directly impacted the numbers we see using our services every day including those people in our community who must devote large portions of their monthly income to rent. We project a 10% increase in the number of households receiving direct housing assistance this year.

Your support will help sustain and expand our housing stability efforts, continuing to provide an average of $650 per household with the option to increase the amount given to more families as needed as they work with our case managers to develop a long-term housing plan.

Grant Request: $35,000

$35,000 will provide case management and housing assistance for about 30 families. This estimate includes both case management costs and direct financial support to households.

Read more about WayForward’s impact here!