Catholic Charities focuses on housing

By Joanna Gardner

Mariluz Rivera, a case manager who works with Catholic Charities’ Social Services for the Homeless (SSH) grant for Camden County, says the case in front of her is a typical one. A woman, who we will refer to as Tina Smith, comes to Rivera facing eviction from her apartment and homelessness.

Smith is a Certified Home Health Aide (CHHA), a health care worker who lives and cares for elderly clients in their homes. Last September, her client died and since CHHAs work on an hourly wage basis, she saw a sharp decrease in her income.

After a few months, she secured another full-time client, but she had already fallen behind on her rent. A single mother, Smith faced child-care payments along with rent and utilities. Her work schedule sometimes saw her working seven days a week, weekends and overnights. She couldn’t catch up, and building late fees finally led to an eviction notice.

Rivera, using SSH funds and working with Smith’s landlord helped Smith determine her contribution and was able to help her catch up on her rent and avoid eviction.

Within the last three months, Catholic Charities has received over $400,000 in SSH grants for four of the counties it serves in southern New Jersey: Camden, Cumberland, Salem and Gloucester. These grants are used to help residents of a particular county who meet certain income requirements and are at risk of becoming homeless.

For Catholic Charities, this focus on avoiding homelessness is crucial to their mission of reducing poverty in Southern New Jersey.

“Housing and homelessness prevention is a specific focus of Catholic Charities,” said Jennifer Dyer, assistant director of Catholic Charities Camden. “We understand that families can’t sustain unless they have safe, affordable housing. We know that for those children to succeed in school, they need a consistent place. Grants enhance the services we already provide to the end of helping prevent homelessness for those at risk and quickly assisting the recently homeless.”

The SSH grants are not the only source of funding that assist in that focus. Salem and Atlantic County are in their second year of Homeless Prevention and Rapid Rehousing grants from the state of N.J. Homeless Prevention Program grants serve Cumberland, Cape May, and Atlantic counties.

Recently the agency received a smaller amount of funding from the umbrella Catholic Charities USA agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the purposes of housing counseling, which will allow Catholic Charities Camden to train its staff to become certified housing counselors.

Sanchez says he’s seen an increasing need for the homeless prevention services the agency provides in recent years in the Camden county region. The increase is made up largely of families who have not needed to rely on social services before and can be overwhelmed by the system.

“We have to be patient with this new face of poverty,” said Jose Sanchez, who manages Camden County’s SSH grant. “They don’t know how to navigate the social service system. These new families that are coming in, they’re frightened, they’re embarrassed. A lot of new low income families don’t know what to do and embarrassment keeps them from doing anything.”

Part of Sanchez’s program in Camden County includes eight hours of case management per client, where individuals or families work directly with case managers to learn how to better manage their finances or change their budgeting.

“We try to help them find ways to save money so they won’t find themselves in that situation again,” Sanchez said.

According to annual Point in Time surveys mandated by HUD to count the number of homeless in each county, New Jersey saw an increase in homelessness by 16 percent in 2014. Camden, Cumberland, and Gloucester counties of southern New Jersey contain 11 percent of N.J.’s statewide homeless population.

Cindy LeBron manages Catholic Charities’ homeless prevention grants for Cumberland county, the county with the highest poverty rate in the state of N.J., according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s September release of poverty statistics for 2014. The same report showed that poverty in the state rose for the sixth year in a row, making New Jersey one of only three states in the nation in which the poverty rate rose in 2013.

“Right now we’re seeing a lot more people who normally wouldn’t need assistance,” LeBron said, echoing Sanchez in Camden County. “These are people who never had to deal with homelessness before and now they’re facing homelessness. These grants are about looking at the whole family. If they can get out of the cycle by getting the help they need to help themselves, they may never have to come back for assistance.”

LeBron worries, along with her colleagues, particularly in Atlantic County, about how the recent closings of five Atlantic City casinos will impact the number of people facing housing insecurity in southern New Jersey and anticipates a further increase.

Catholic Charities’ package of assistance for those facing homelessness across the six counties includes a large grant to assist veterans at risk of homelessness, and a state-funded disaster case management program, which, two years after Super Storm Sandy, continues to assist a large number of clients, particularly with housing and utilities-related problems. In 2013 alone the disaster program provided over 1,000 services to victims of the storm.

“We’re committed to housing,” said Kevin Hickey, executive director of Catholic Charities Camden. “We see this commitment as part of our mission to reduce poverty. Help a family maintain sustainable housing and you provide them with hope.”