Editorial: Shelter - Homelessness hits women, children hardest

Article in the Fayetteville Observer about the WGC Think Tank on Homelessness in the Cumberland County Community:

Published: 12:00 AM, Sun Oct 24, 2010

http://www.fayobserver.com/articles/2010/10/24/1042024?sac=Opin

For too many Cumberland County residents, this is anything but home, sweet home. It's no home at all.

We have a big problem with homelessness. There are about twice as many homeless people in Cumberland as in Forsyth, another urban county with about the same population. We have nearly as many homeless as far-larger Wake County.
 
The good news is that overall numbers of our unsheltered residents are declining. The official tally shows homeless have dropped from 1,074 in 2008 to 965 last year. That's a decline of about 10 percent.

But there's a dark side: The numbers of homeless women and children grew in that same period, from 560 to 655, up 17 percent. That includes nearly 400 homeless children.

Many people who work with homeless residents say those numbers are low, that many more haven't been counted - especially children.

There is one other piece of good news in this sad saga: a fast-growing, remarkably effective new philanthropy has targeted homelessness as a problem needing a solution. The Women's Giving Circle of Fayetteville, which gives sizable grants to programs that improve the lives of women and children, has launched a project to study and find effective solutions to homelessness in this county.

The group especially wants to put roofs over the heads of unsheltered women and children. That is a noble and achievable goal. We're not talking about people who live under bridges or out in the woods by choice - people whose plight is not easily altered. Instead, these are people who have lost their homes largely because of economic or domestic problems.

There are solutions everywhere. At a "think tank" breakfast earlier this month, the Giving Circle handed out a letter-sized sheet covered on both sides with a directory of services for the homeless. They include shelters, "transitional" housing, meals, help with utilities, food assistance, medical care, mental health services and help for victims of domestic violence.

Two things were notably absent: overall coordination and permanent housing.

A lot of organizations are doing good things for the homeless - feeding them, clothing them, providing a place to sleep, and more. But there's not a lot of coordination evident.

Communities with successful programs for the homeless have one agency working to coordinate efforts and also have programs that put the homeless back in permanent housing as quickly as possible. This is especially effective for families.

We hope the Giving Circle will take a close look at both of those issues. And we thank members for tackling the problem. We're confident they'll make a difference.

NC Gives highlights the WGC on their Website

http://ncgives.org/news/local-giving-circle-reaches-out-to-homeless-women-and-children/

Local giving circle reaches out to homeless women and children

October 18, 2010

The Women's Giving Circle of Fayetteville was founded through a partnership between NCGives and the Cumberland Community Foundation. (A "giving circle" is a group of everyday folks who join forces to give their time, talent and treasure to a common cause.)

Here's a story about how these local ladies are coming together to give back and help homeless women and children in their community:

"Women's Giving Circle focuses on helping the homeless"
(The Fayetteville Observer)

A home helped change the trajectory of J.R. Williams' life. "We were doomed, statistically speaking," Williams told a group of about 80 people at the Holiday Inn Bordeaux Tuesday morning.

When he was 9, his family lived in housing that was unreliable and sub-par at best. Both his parents had grown up poor, and his mother had gotten pregnant with Williams at age 17. It wasn't a promising life script.

Then the family was able to get a home through Habitat for Humanity and, through it, they achieved stability and the opportunity for a better life. "It meant so much to us," said Williams, who went on to graduate near the top of his high school class and then to both UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke. He's now a first vice president and regional business development manager with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Charlotte.

His listeners included people from throughout the community who'd been invited by the Women's Giving Circle of Fayetteville to help brainstorm ideas to help homeless women and children in Cumberland County. The philanthropic group concentrates on local projects that meet the basic needs of food, shelter or health care for women and children, and members said Tuesday that homelessness is a particular problem...

Read the full article

Women's Giving Circle Focuses On Helping the Homeless

Published in the Fayetteville Observer: 12:00 AM, Wed Oct 13, 2010

Women's Giving Circle focuses on helping the homeless

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By Catherine Pritchard
Staff writer

A home helped change the trajectory of J.R. Williams' life.

"We were doomed, statistically speaking," Williams told a group of about 80 people at the Holiday Inn Bordeaux Tuesday morning. When he was 9, his family lived in housing that was unreliable and sub-par at best. Both his parents had grown up poor, and his mother had gotten pregnant with Williams at age 17.
It wasn't a promising life script.

Then the family was able to get a home through Habitat for Humanity and, through it, they achieved stability and the opportunity for a better life.

"It meant so much to us," said Williams, who went on to graduate near the top of his high school class and then to both UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke. He's now a first vice president and regional business development manager with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Charlotte.

His listeners included people from throughout the community who'd been invited by the Women's Giving Circle of Fayetteville to help brainstorm ideas to help homeless women and children in Cumberland County. The philanthropic group concentrates on local projects that meet the basic needs of food, shelter or health care for women and children, and members said Tuesday that homelessness is a particular problem.
Patty Collie, a member of the giving circle, said the number of homeless people in Cumberland County dropped 10 percent from 2008 to 2009. But the numbers of homeless women and children grew.
Of 965 people identified as homeless on a specific date in 2009, 256 were women and 399 were children. Both numbers were up nearly 17 percent over 2008.

Meanwhile, she said, Cumberland County's homeless numbers are striking when compared with other counties. Forsyth County's total population is close to Cumberland's - 337,198 in 2008, compared with 309,542 here. But it had half the number of homeless people.

Wake County's total population then was 829,218, more than twice Cumberland's, but its homeless population was only slightly higher than Cumberland's, at 1,152.

"The statistics were so heart-breaking to us," Collie said later.

After Williams spoke, the meeting broke into small groups, each addressing ways to deal with homelessness locally, especially with women and children. Their ideas were written down and will be combined into a summary that will be the focus of another meeting on the subject in November.

"The hope from that is that we actually do get a pilot project to fund," Collie said.