Path Home (Formerly Portland Homeless Family Solutions)
November 7, 2022
Amount Requested$30,000.00
6220 SE 92nd Ave
Portland, Oregon 97266
Emma Hoyle
Development Director
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- Food and Housing Security
General Operating
Path Home (formerly PHFS) empowers families with children to get back into housing and stay there.
$30,000.00
$350,000.00
Yes
We seek $20,000 to support Path Home's Prevention Program and $10,000 to support General Operations, focusing on Family Village shelter.
The Prevention Program stops homelessness for families from happening in the first place, so kids and their parents don't have to experience the trauma and adverse childhood experiences associated with homelessness. Our program targets families who are facing imminent homelessness, usually a 72-hour eviction notice for non- payment of rent or utilities. Many of the families we serve live paycheck to paycheck and have little in savings. Our goal is to help families prevent homelessness and provide deep enough assistance, so they are thriving, not just surviving.
The general operating support will support our other programs:
•Family Village – A shelter where 17 families with kids stay at a time in individual, private bedrooms. The first shelter in Oregon with trauma-informed design & architecture, our shelter provides opportunities for playing, healing, and rebuilding after homelessness, and offers support to help families move back into stable housing. Families each have their own private bedroom with real beds, and they have access to an array of common spaces including a central kitchen and dining, library, computer lab, laundry room, kids play areas, vegetable garden, picnic area, playground, basketball court, and more.
•Rapid Re-Housing – Families experiencing homelessness move back into housing. Path Home provides rent assistance, case management, and retention services to help families stay housed, usually for around a year or so. Families create action plans to increase their financial stability, navigate community resources, access medical, mental health, and recovery care, and gain educational and employment opportunities. 88% of families keep their housing long-term.
•Cash Transfer – our newest program, Path Home provides $575 cash to families each month for two years. Our goal is that families will increase financial security, reduce debt, have more time to spend with family, and increase their joy and wellness. This cash transfer pilot project is based on worldwide research that shows the fastest way to end poverty is by giving people cash and letting them manage their own households.
Path Home serves approximately 1,300 kids and parents annually through our programs from about 425 families. All families with children under 18 who are currently experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness in the Portland-metro area are eligible for our services. All families have incomes below 100% the federal poverty line, 75% are communities of color, 43% are adults and 57% are kids. The average age of an individual in shelter is ten years old, and 58% are kids under the age of five.
Any families with children under 18 who are experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness.
Portland metro region.
• Prevent homelessness for 75 families (215 kids and parents)
• 88% of families will keep their housing long-term
• 70 families experiencing homelessness will stay in shelter, with an average shelter stay of 85 days
In the Prevention Program, Path Home pays back rent and utilities for families during times of emergency like a car breakdown, medical emergency, or sudden loss of hours at work. During the time we provide assistance to families, we also provide case management services to help families gain new skills and help them avoid being at risk for homelessness in the future. This includes case management, finance and budgeting training, service navigation, barrier mitigation, and landlord-tenant education and advocacy.
All services provided by Path Home use culturally-informed, evidence-based practices including Progressive Engagement, which is the idea that all families are different and have different needs, thus all families need different services, so every family receives customized, tailored services to meet their needs. We ask families to identify how Path Home can assist them and trust them to create their own goals and make their own choices, which gives them confidence and hope for their lives. Our staff are there to act as guides and support them to actualize their goals. We use the Critical Time Intervention model of case management which provides 9-months of time-limited case management to help families identify three goals that they want to accomplish, and then provides three stages of decreasing levels of intensive support to families to accomplish their goals. Examples of goals include acquiring more income, finding a more affordable place to live, stabilizing mental health, learning a new job skill to get a higher paying job, navigating entitlement benefits like SSDI or social security, enrolling the kids in a sports league, finding a religious congregation to attend, etc.
We actively practice Trauma-Informed Care to provide culturally responsive, strengths-based framework that includes an understanding of what happens in the brain when someone experiences psychological trauma like homelessness, and a sustained commitment to respond in a way that emphasizes physical, psychological, and emotional safety for both clients and providers. Trauma-informed care creates opportunities for participants to build resilience by enhancing dignity, restoring power, and rebuilding a sense of control and empowerment in their daily lives.
Our diverse staff reflects the community we serve and is highly trained and able to assess family’s needs and provide compassionate support to them. According to a recent demographic survey of our staff, 41% identify as BIPOC, 36% experience a disability, 47% identify as LGBTQIA+, 36% are survivors of domestic abuse, 47% have lived experience of homelessness, and 52% experience a mental health condition. Our expert staff is critical to our ability to accomplish our goals.
Families are referred to our Prevention Program through our Homeless Family System Partners, the PHFS housing team, landlords, and on our website.
At Path Home, the need for our services has greatly increased as the very visible homelessness crisis gets worse. According to The State of Homelessness Report from 2021, Oregon has the second rate of unhoused people living unsheltered in America. This uses 2020 data which was collected before Covid-19 was declared a national emergency, so we know the need has only increased. In addition, the Oregon Department of Education reports that 2,844 students living in Multnomah County experienced homelessness during the 2019-2020 school year (1 in 32 kids). Families experiencing homelessness now need more support than ever. Currently, 800 families are waiting on a waitlist for Multnomah County shelter and rapid re-housing programs from the Homeless Family System (referenced above). Now that the eviction moratoria have expired, we are seeing evictions at pre-pandemic levels. Families need help keeping their housing amidst rising rent prices and stagnant wages.
Path Home collects and uses data to hold ourselves accountable to producing measurable results and to continually improve our programs and services in response to family and staff feedback. We track data in Service Point Data System and Apricot for Case Management databases. Quarterly, our program directors and managers examine outcomes to ensure we are meeting our goals, to problem-solve if we are off track, and to respond to feedback from families in our program about how we can provide better, more trauma-informed services. Data collection tools include program enrollment and exit, HMIS demographic forms and F-SPDAT assessments, monthly status checks with each family on housing and income, participant surveys, and in-person interviews. We measure the following outcomes for families:
-Length of time experiencing homelessness - our goal is to prevent it, or to make it as short as possible.
-Number of families served in each program
-Number of families who move into permanent housing
-% of families who keep housing long-term
-% of families who work while they are in our programs
-% of families who reduce debt, connect to a new supportive community, increase their sense of housing security
01/01/2023
06/30/2023
One of Path Home’s core values is collaboration at every level. Path Home is a founding member of the Homeless Family System of Care, a collaboration of nine organizations that work with homeless families and is the Coordinated Entry System for homeless families in our county. This collaboration is coordinated and convened by the Joint Office on Homeless Services. Our partners include: NAYA Family Center, JOIN, Self Enhancement Inc. (SEI), El Programa Hispano Católico, Immigrant & Refugee Community Organization (IRCO), Human Solutions, NARA, Latino Network and 211 Info.
Path Home also collaborates with other nonprofit partners to furnish families' new homes (Community Warehouse), provide educational opportunities like trade school or community college (Oregon Tradeswomen, Portland Community College, Constructing Hope), mental health and substance-abuse counseling (Morrison Child & Family Services, Cascadia Behavioral Health, Central City Concern), domestic violence advocacy (Raphael House), school supports (Mckinney Vinto Homeless Family Advocates, Community Transitional School), and childcare (Headstart).
We operate on a fiscal year calendar. This grant will help in the later half of the current fiscal year, January 1 - June 30, 2023.
Unapproved