CLPHA Press Room

A new publication from the King County Housing Authority, Seattle Housing Authority, and Tacoma Housing Authority shares their PHAs' perspectives on how the Moving to Work (MTW) program has allowed them to innovate programming and tailor housing resources and services for low-income people in the Puget Sound region. The piece outlines how the MTW program, coupled with a strong collaborative relationship among the PHAs, has helped them to make more targeted local impacts and expand housing opportunities and services for the vulnerable communities who call their PHAs home. 

Read the Publication

From the Chicago Housing Authority's press release:

Thomas King had earned an Associate Degree from Truman College and had transferred to Northeastern Illinois University where he’d been accepted into the Godwin School of Education. Everything was going well for the former restaurant worker who decided to switch gears and pursue a teaching career.

Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed. King, like many others, fell into a depression – the lack of campus access creating a feeling of isolation that exacerbated distractions and made online education challenging.

“It all just unraveled,” King said. “The whole thing just threw me off. And I started realizing something was wrong."

King is once again ready to pursue his teaching aspirations after three years of mental health struggles, thanks in part to the Chicago Housing Authority’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Health and Wellness Program. The program, established in 2022, offers support to individuals and families participating in the HCV program who may be experiencing various life stressors that place them at risk of housing instability or other situations that create difficulties in their daily lives.

While public housing residents have historically had access to mental health support services through the agency’s third-party service providers, this program is a first for the agency’s HCV participants. It represents a fresh focus for CHA that addresses mental health issues and utilizes trauma-informed counseling that is intentional and strategic specifically for those in the HCV program.

“CHA is evolving as an agency, and, as part of that evolution, we have recognized that we must invest in supportive services in a way that we haven’t done before,” CHA CEO Tracey Scott said. “By proactively helping residents make their mental health a priority, we are taking the steps necessary to make sure they have a better and brighter present and more options for the future.”

Cheryl Burns, CHA’s Chief Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Officer, said: “In my day-to-day experience with participants, I noticed how many of them had needs that CHA was unable to meet,” she said. “Hiring a clinical therapist to assist families was a natural outgrowth of the services that we offer. We provide support to families in many ways, but recognizing the stress and trauma that people were experiencing made it important to offer an outlet that made our engagement more productive."

For King, the falling out of a routine led to not sleeping well which led to a depression that caused him to drift away from friends. It is something he is still coping with but feels a sense of support since participating in the Health and Wellness program.

“I’m so glad I found it,” he said. “For me it’s the reinforcing ideas of mindfulness and allowing me to talk about things that are going on. It’s really important to have someone to talk with about things that we’re not necessarily comfortable talking about."

The program is available to HCV participants and property owners, offering general resources as well as information on how they can provide support to tenants who may be experiencing challenges. There is no cost and participation is confidential and has no impact on a participant’s voucher.

Services are available by phone, through video conference or in person at a designated CHA office during normal business hours and include:

• Case Management
• Care Coordination
• Information on Community-Based Resources
• Individual and Family Therapy
• General Support with Conflict Resolution between Property Owners and participants.

King credits Program Manager Doreen Green, a clinical therapist who helped establish the program in June 2022, with responding fast, giving timely information and providing excellent service that helped them immediately.

“I am very happy that Mr. King reached out to the program,” Green said. “I believe Mr. King has shown that it is okay to be human. I commend him for asking for help and taking steps to make changes in his life. I appreciate being able to witness his growth as he continues to not only be alive - but to truly live and thrive."

Now, King is meeting with professors at NEIU to discuss his road to a teaching degree. He is optimistic for the first time in months and looking to learn new things and finish what he started.

“I’m in a better place right now,” he said. “I’m looking to get back into a routine, back to being on campus and back to interacting with people.”

From Community College Daily:

In 2014, Tacoma Community College (TCC) and the Tacoma Housing Authority (THA) began a partnership to help housing-insecure students.

Funded through the U.S. Housing & Urban Development’s (HUD) Moving to Work program, the College Housing Assistance Program (CHAP) provided housing choice vouchers to subsidize rent for homeless and near-homeless TCC students. On average, that subsidy gave students a $450 discount in an area where the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $1,000.

Through TCC, program participants also received some support services, such as help navigating other social service programs.

How did CHAP work? That’s the focus of a seven-year study released Tuesday by non-profit Education Northwest. Researchers evaluated six cohorts – 422 students – who applied for the program between Fall 2017 and Spring 2019.

Researchers evaluated five things:

• How often in the program did students lease up?
• Did the program reduce use of homelessness services?
• Did the program increase academic success, including graduation rates?
• Did the program affect employment, public benefits, health and health services and criminal justice?
• How did leasing up relate to those outcomes?

Read Community College Daily's article "Housing assistance program improved completion rates, student well-being."

From the Chicago Housing Authority's press release:

Two-thousand dollars may not seem like a lot. But, for DePaul freshman Kelvin Jackson Pore, it was the difference between realizing his dreams and not.

“The CHA Scholarship was the deciding factor in him being able to go to college,” said his mother, Betty S. Pore. “Most of it his tuition was paid, but this was a lifesaver. We were struggling to make it but that $2,000 made it to where he could register for classes. I’m not sure what I would’ve done otherwise. So I’m grateful.”

The same CHA/Springboard to Success (S2S) Scholarship that helped Jackson Pore attend DePaul and major in Game Design is available to current CHA public housing residents or Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) participants who have at least a 2.0 GPA and are high school seniors or college undergraduates. Awards are based on applicants’ academic merit, community involvement and essay content. Applicants must plan to attend an accredited two-or-four-year college or university in the U.S. in the Fall of 2024. CHA’s nonprofit partner, S2S, supports the scholarship.

The deadline for the 2024-25 scholarship application period is May 15.

Now, Kelvin Jackson Pore is on his way. His interest in Game Design was reinforced several years ago as a participant of the summer Graphic & Game Design program at DePaul that is tailored to CHA high school students. An honor student at ITW David Speer Academy high school, Kelvin is also earning his welding degree while attending DePaul.

“One day in high school, my mom said: ‘You’ve got to get a trade – always have a Plan B,’” he said. “Now I’m close to getting my welding certification. And that’s what I plan on doing until I graduate.”

Jackson Pore hopes to eventually own his own Game Design company. He is inspired by his mother, who had to give up college at a young age and was at a time homeless. Now she’s a few semesters away from graduating college herself.

He encourages other young CHA residents to apply for the CHA/S2S Scholarship that helped his mom so much.

“You don’t really lose anything by applying for it,” he said. “You might as well take advantage of it.”

Pore said she is proud of her oldest child who is one of three.

“He’s so easy and laid back - even when he was a baby,” she said. “He doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t drink. He’s just a responsible kid. I’m so proud of him. I look at us as a team. I set ‘em up, he knocks ‘em down.”

From The NYCHA Journal:

Since June 2022, NYCHA’s Resident Economic Empowerment and Sustainability (REES) Office has partnered with Working Credit to help NYCHA residents in public housing and Section 8 take the steps they need to improve their credit scores. Working Credit is a non-profit organization that provides credit-building workshops and counseling to help participants achieve their financial goals.  

The NYCHA Journal spoke with Morgan Spears, Chief Community Engagement Officer at Working Credit, to learn more about the organization, its mission to interrupt structural racism in the credit system, and how it partners with NYCHA residents.  

Tell us about Working Credit.  
We’re a national non-profit with a mission to interrupt structural racism by providing equitable access to credit-building education, credit-building counseling and coaching support, as well as getting people connected to affordable products they need to thrive financially. We serve a lot of different organizations and companies all across the country.  

We offer workshops where we do an in-depth dive about what credit is and how the credit system works. Our goal is to demystify credit because there’s so much misinformation out there that can lead people astray. We want to get people accurate information about the credit system so they can build or rebuild their credit in a way where they’re able to thrive [according to how] financial success looks like for them. We recognize that how one person defines financial success is different than the next person.  

We provide one-on-one credit-building counseling and coaching support. This is how we partner with NYCHA residents. An individual gets paired with a credit-building counselor and they’ll work together for an entire year, so that person could message the counselor as much or as little as they want. They do a 60-minute credit building counseling session where they discuss what their financial goals are, what their current financial status is, and where they want to be in three months, six months, or 12 months from now. In the counseling session we pull their credit report; it’s a soft pull that does not impact the credit score because we’re doing it for educational purposes. We’re able to show them what’s on their report, what their credit score is today, and how we can help them improve or increase their credit score to reach their goals. We then create a credit action plan that’s very individualized and tailored to that person.   

What does successful completion of the program look like?  
One thing I love about our program is that the way we define success is based upon that individual’s credit action plan. That being said, we do have some primary metric indicators, such as how many residents increase their credit score from when they started the program until when they hit the 12-month mark, but most importantly, how many of those residents were able to get a prime credit score, which is above a 660. Ideally, we’ll have a lot of people increase their credit score – but a score above a 660 will make a substantial financial difference in how they’re able to navigate their day-to-day finances. 

Can you share a success story with us?  
Yes! We had a NYCHA resident who started with a pretty low credit score of 490, as well as unpaid collections that were affecting her credit rating. Despite facing a tough time with her income decreasing, she kept working hard on her credit. We helped her get rid of that unpaid collection, and in just one year her credit score increased 172 points.  

We’ve reached over 300 NYCHA residents. In our data from 2023 with NYCHA residents after 12 months, 42 percent of total residents reached a prime credit score, and 60 percent of the total increased their overall credit score. There were people who started the program without a credit score, but after completing the 12 months in the program, 100 percent of the residents we work with became scorable.  

We try to reach as many residents as we can. Next month we’re going to be doing more workshops and starting our next cycle with NYCHA residents.   

Is there anything else you want NYCHA residents to know about Working Credit?  
I want to highlight that Working Credit is very committed to interrupting structural racism and we recognize that a large part of our financial system historically and currently is rooted in systemic racism in terms of how it was created and how it oftentimes keeps a large majority of people of color outside of being able to access affordable credit. Even though the credit-scoring algorithm itself does not take race into account, our financial system does.   

I’m a big proponent of making sure people have the proper knowledge, but having knowledge is one thing; having the opportunity and support to implement what you know is another thing. What our program really tries to get at is to create more equity in the credit system to allow for people who have historically been disenfranchised and marginalized out of financial systems to be able to enter the space, not just with knowledge but also with the support that’s needed for them to thrive.