You can't shelter in place if you don't have a place to shelter, says Stacie Birchett, vice president of external affairs at the Better Housing Coalition. The Richmond, Virginia-based NeighborWorks organization is working to ensure their residents are able to keep their housing during a time when many are losing jobs or working fewer hours due to COVID-19.
"We're doing everything we can to keep our families and seniors in their households," Birchett said. They continue to raise money for their many programs. A recent infusion of funds from the NeighborWorks America Rental Resilience Fund, made possible with significant support from the Wells Fargo Foundation, came at just the right time, she says. The $600 in supplemental income that was accompanying unemployment checks each month is about to halt, and housing leaders expect August to be an especially hard month for those struggling to make housing payments.
Birchett says the rental resilience money her organization received will go to rental relief. "So many of our residents have been hit hard by the pandemic," she says. "They held jobs in the service sector or the hospitality sector or home health care. The aim of our programming is to help lift families from a place of crisis to a place of stability and on to a place of financial capability."
She says her organization, which develops both apartments and single-family homes, is launching a family financial fortification plan to help residents recover from the impacts of COVID-19. "A big part of that is emergency rental assistance," she says. They're also hiring two grant-funded counselors to help tenants navigate their career and academic options in the hopes of finding better wages.
As soon as they got word of the $52,000 in relief funds, she says, "we rolled out our rental assistance pilot plan to residents of two of our properties. It came at just the right time."
The funding came at the right time for a number of NeighborWorks network organizations. The Wells Fargo Foundation, as part of its philanthropic efforts to keep 100,000 people housed in response to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19, quickly stepped forward to support. NeighborWorks America was identified as one of several national nonprofit housing intermediaries to receive funding from the Wells Fargo Foundation as nonprofit housing organizations navigate complexities to deliver services in new ways and help them access tools and resources to prevent eviction, mitigate foreclosure and stabilize communities. With support from the Wells Fargo Foundation, the NeighborWorks America Rental Resilience Fund will disperse more than $10.2 million to approximately 170 network organizations, and each organization will receive between $5,000 and $400,000 depending on the size of their rental portfolio. Members of the NeighborWorks network manage more than 175,000 rental homes. Additionally, NeighborWorks will be able to provide a little over $2.5 million in grants through its Critical Relief Fund to help defray unexpected expenses and support housing counseling services related to COVID-19.
More than 190 organizations will receive between $5,000 and $25,000 grants for the operational and technology infrastructure they'll need to support their communities, continue operations and address safety concerns. Understanding that housing counseling plays a critical role in helping families not only acquire, but keep their homes in times of crisis, the Wells Fargo Foundation also made available training scholarships, administered by NeighborWorks, to organizations providing rental counseling, foreclosure counseling and financial capability training, to expand the knowledge and expertise of their housing counselors.
"NeighborWorks America is uniquely positioned to get our network organizations the resources they need to help the residents of their communities as we try to get through these times together," says Marietta Rodriguez, president and CEO of NeighborWorks America. "Our own organization has had to pivot to respond, and our network organizations have done the same. We've seen them add new services during COVID, and we've seen them work with individuals as jobs have disappeared. Our organizations have worked to help residents contact their creditors, moved their financial capability training online and revamped the way they do business. We got them emergency grant funding when COVID began spreading across the country. Now, five months in, we are able to provide even more funding with the support of organizations like the Wells Fargo Foundation, because they understand the value of our work."
"This is a time where cross-sector partnership can really happen because the need is so acute," Rodriguez says. "There are a lot of organizations looking to help communities. Wells Fargo is one of them." Rodriguez said NeighborWorks' partner organizations understand the need for safe housing and for rental resilience. "They also understand that our organization is uniquely positioned to distribute the funding among organizations all over the United States to get it quickly to the people and businesses who needed it most."Ruby Bean, director of development at Community Concepts in Lewiston, Maine, says her organization is preparing to use the funding to help with rental relief. But she mentions a wide range of programs to help tenants obtain everything from diapers and cleaning supplies to food and facemasks. Some of the Critical Relief money went toward those, she said, adding that the cost of 10,000 masks totals $15,000.
"It goes fast," she says. "The rental resilience funds are helping those who cannot make their full rental payments as well as additional deep cleaning work in our senior buildings to make sure all common areas and frequently touched surfaces are thoroughly cleaned and sanitized on an ongoing basis. We want people to stay home and we need to help keep them safe and healthy in their homes."
The organization has also been taking care of guests at a temporary shelter. "By operating the temporary wellness shelter, we saw firsthand the need for a low barrier shelter in the Lewiston area and we remain committed to working with state and local officials and our community partners to end homelessness," Bean says.
Before the rental relief money became available, Community Concepts processed more than 1,000 applications for the state's rental relief program. But that money is drying up, says Jennifer Boenig, communications and marketing manager.Meanwhile, residents "aren't able to pay their rent and their utility bills," Bean says. "They're not making the money that they did because they're home with their kids and that sort of thing. We want to supplement where we can to be sure they can meet their basic needs."
Boenig says funding from partners "gives us the flexibility to meet the clients where their needs need to be met and that's at home, staying safe."
People of color are particularly vulnerable, Bean adds. "They make up 1.9 percent of the population in Maine but with COVID cases, they make up 24 percent.
Rodriguez says a primary goal with the funding is to let the organizations, who best understand the needs in their own communities, get the money where it needs to go, "to make it go farther in their individual communities and to help fight the inequities we're seeing today."
Our work is ongoing, she says, adding that we learned a lot of lessons from the 2008 housing crisis, and it has helped inform NeighborWorks America's response to all that is before us. We are always trying to understand how we can best meet the network's needs, allowing organizations to more quickly help residents who are struggling.
"We look forward to exploring new ways to help our communities, and to providing some of the programs, processes and funds our network organizations require to successfully move forward," Rodriguez says, noting that NeighborWorks America plans to continue to develop partnerships to help identify solutions to meet the myriad of needs. "This global pandemic does not discriminate," she says. "We need to rally together to provide as much relief as we can."
