The
New Life Community
Aired March
4, 2003
In
her State of the City Address, Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell promised
to build 1,500 new housing units. But affordable housing options
in Northeast Ohio continue to dwindle. Advocates say Cleveland
has lost 1,000 units of affordable housing over the last three
years, and up to 4,000 are on Cuyahoga County Metropolitan Housing
Authority waiting lists for subsidized housing. Even scarcer are
programs that prepare families for the rigors of finding and being
able to pay for a home. One program that teaches women with children
to find a job and a place to live, is New Life Community in Cleveland.
The program transforms homeless and jobless women with children
into self-sufficient, productive members of society. ideastream's
Janet Babin reports.
Women
in the New Life Community program start each weekday with a group
meeting. It’s called a yea, me session. They sit in a circle
in a chapel-like room and relate something positive that they
did within the past 24 hours. Gloria has been in the program the
longest.
Gloria:
My yea me is just to see another day.
Sometimes
the mornings become emotional, as the women reflect on how much
their lives have changed since joining the New Life program, and
how much the employees have helped them overcome enormous difficulties.
Gloria:
She just wonderful. (crying) she's like a mother and she don't
even know it... I just wanna tell you... thank you...
The four-month
program is intense. Residents stay at New Life rent-free with
their children, but must keep their apartments neat and undergo
daily inspections. There's no room for addiction or mental illness.
Everyone must be clean for at least 18 months, and submit to random
drug testing. New Life Executive Director Donna Asnani says the
faith-based program gives women the tools they need to find and
keep a job that pays more than minimum wage.
Donna
Asnani: Anybody can get minimum wage, but if we expect
people to stay employed, it has to be something that comes from
the heart.
New Life's
budget this year is just $840,000, with about a quarter of that
coming from Cuyahoga County and the state of Ohio. Last year,
about 40 women graduated from the program. 100% had full time
jobs when they left, and about as many eventually moved on to
permanent housing. The average salary the women received was $8.49
per hour. In a review of the 2,000 graduates, after one year,
78% were still employed. Participants often find work in the medical
field, social services, community service or banking. 33-year-old
Margo McKnight is a New Life success story. On a recent Tuesday,
her day off, she's enjoying a rare moment of solitude in her modest
upstairs double in Shaker Heights. Her five boys, from twins aged
18 months to 8 years old are in school or day care. When she arrived
at New Life last year, her twins were just four weeks old.
Margo
McKnight: When I was in the hospital, they only give
you two days, I had a c section, stayed three days and asked
to stay another day, cause I didn't. I knew what it was like
taking care of the boys alone, so depressing thinking of what
it would be like taking care of all five.
McKnight
says the program was hard, but for the first time in her life,
she knew how to interview for a job.
Margo
McKnight: Not only do they give you job training, in
how to look for work and what to do when you find it. I remember
being in the interview and remembering everything - what to
say, and it worked and it's just amazing.
McKnight
expected to have trouble finding housing after graduation, but
didn’t.
Margo
McKnight: The place was a total wreck, and I'm like,
I’ll take it. So he told me he was going to do a credit
check, so I told him my credit is very bad. He called the next
day and said I was right, but said he would let me have the
place anyway, because I was honest.
But Executive
Director Asnani says McKnight's experience is an exception. She
says most women have great difficulty finding affordable housing
after graduating from New Life.
Donna
Asnani: If you look at national low-income statistics,
the fair market rental in Cuyahoga County is $726. That means
in order to generate that, you've got to make $29,000 dollars
a year. If you leave here at $8 an hour, and that's good money,
the numbers are easy to figure out, you'll make $16,000, not
enough. That's the gap, and it's very real.
Without
the motivation a home of one's own provides, Asnani fears that
the New Life graduates won't be able to hold on to the disciplines
it took four hard months for them to master. Four new families
move in to new life apartments later today, and officially begin
the rigorous program, Monday morning. In Cleveland, Janet Babin,
90.3.
Support
for ideastream's coverage of Affordable Housing issues is provided
by the Sisters of Charity Foundation.
