Funds to fuel help for families
MIFA’S big shift to assist homeless
Memphis and Shelby County will formally launch Thursday an $8.1 million “Memphis Strong Families Initiative” and a “rapidrehousing” program that would house 100 of the city’s most vulnerable homeless families and provide financial and other help to 800 families during the next four years.
The programs are part of longterm strategies to end homelessness here and will include an end to the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association’s 24 years of operating transitional housing for the homeless. MIFA executive director Sally Heinz said Wednesday she is turning over the agency’s 73 transitional housing units to the North Memphis Community Development Corp. to operate as permanent housing for the homeless.
The turnover and a progress report on the city’s fight against homelessness will be part of a Thursday morning news conference marking the second anniversary of the Memphis and Shelby County Action Plan to End Homelessness.
It is a plan that Katie Kitchin,
executive director of the Community Alliance for the Homeless, said is largely based on federal strategies to focus more effort and funding to putting the homeless into permanent housing to save money and to help the homeless find jobs to eventually support themselves.
Kitchin said during the last year the Alliance and public and private nonprofit agencies have received grants of more than $8.1 million. Most of that was a $5.1 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services Children’s Bureau to help launch the Memphis Strong Families Initiative. One of its primary focuses is keeping families together to prevent children from going into foster care.
“Nationally, the data they use is that 30 percent of all foster care involves a parent who is homeless,” said Kitchin.
She said the Strong Fam- ilies Initiative involves collaboration among city, county and federal governments, the Community Alliance for the Homeless, MIFA, the North Memphis Community Development Corp., Tennessee Community Services Agency, the Plough Foundation and, among others, six local nonprofit agencies.
The other part of the strategy is the Memphis Homeless Prevention Rapid Rehousing program. Kitchin said she and her partners sometimes call that the “shelter diver- sion” program. “It provides short-term rental assistance and longer-term home-based support,” she said, to help families avoid life on the streets.
At the North Memphis Community Development Corp., executive director Cornelius Sanders said his agency has more than 40 apartments in the Memphis area for low-tomoderate income families and is a partner with other agencies on another 192 housing units. He said the 73 units of housing donated by MIFA will be converted to 68 apartments because some will be expanded from twobedroom to four-bedroom apartments to accommodate larger families. Sanders said he will now be landlord of the former MIFA units.
Heinz said the money MIFA once spent to operate the apartments now will be used for other parts of the fight against homelessness. “We’re putting everything we can into the rapid rehousing program. It’s really homeless prevention.”