Businesses on board Fort Worth homelessness plan
As Fort WorthÂ’s plan to end homelessness moves forward, more North Texas businesses are chipping in to help.
Mike Guyton considers his companyÂ’s involvement as a matter of simple economics. Guyton is vice president of customer operations with Oncor Electric Delivery and a board member with United Way of Tarrant County.
“A lot of times we might think: ‘Hey, we’re not spending any money at all on the homeless,’ but if you look at the numbers, we’re all spending roughly $30 million on housing, taking homeless people to hospitals, which the hospitals then let them out, something happens, and they go back,” to the hospital, Guyton said. “We’re not ever solving the problem. From the business standpoint, it makes sense. It will be cheaper to actually solve the problem.”
A solution to chronic homelessness – defined as a period of more than 12 months without a secure living environment – is a goal of the Directions Home plan the City of Fort Worth adopted this year.
The plan also aims to make homelessness rare, short-term and non-recurring by 2018, by providing a combination of housing and services.
GuytonÂ’s involvement began about a year ago, he said, when he and Andy Taft, president of Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., visited the Day Resource Center for the Homeless. Later, Taft and Guyton visited Otis Thornton, Fort WorthÂ’s homelessness coordinator, to plan a trip with Mayor Mike Moncrief, the City Council and other community leaders. The itinerary involved visits to learn how other cities are dealing with the issue.
On that trip, Moncrief said, he learned three lessons: Housing without services will not work, services without housing will not work, and “doing nothing won’t work.”
“Permanent, supportive housing is the solution,” Moncrief said. “It’s the economically sensible way to approach a permanent and meaningful solution towards a reduction and, hopefully, elimination of homelessness in our city in the next 10 years.
“The commitment to begin that process had to start with the city, and it did with the roughly $3 million that was contained in a very difficult budget year to do so,” Moncrief said. “We also have involvement from the business community on this issue unlike any we’ve ever had in the past.”
For the first time in Fort WorthÂ’s history, the city and United Way of Tarrant County have teamed to raise money for the Directions Home plan, Moncrief said.
This year, United Way of Tarrant County added homelessness as a special-focus issue on its pledge cards, said Tim McKinney, president and CEO of United Way of Tarrant County.
Fort Worth has agreed to funnel about $1.5 million through United Way, McKinney said, and an allocations committee will disperse those funds to agencies benefiting the homeless.
“Homelessness is a community-wide problem,” McKinney said. “It’s not just located on East Lancaster and West Vickery. Some of these people [are] not chronically homeless. Some of them are just people who have lost their jobs and lost their homes, and we need to find a way to get them trained and back in the workforce as soon as we can. That is an economic benefit to the city.”
Other businesses involved in the effort include UPS, the Sheraton Arlington Hotel, City of Arlington and Goodwill industries, said Andre Johnson. Johnson works with an effort through Workforce Solutions called Project Wish, a job-readiness and placement program.
“We do everything from interviewing, resumes, developing a career plan, interviewing skills, lab and market researching, career assessments,” Johnson said. “Preparing them for careers, not so much jobs, because jobs can be temporary, but careers.”
Participants go through a seven-week workshop program that requires creation of a resume, and a professional e-mail address, registration to work in Texas, and the identification of job skills and matching occupations, Johnson said.
“After the seven weeks, they complete the course with a graduation ceremony, and we refer them to the employers who came on board,” Johnson said.
The programÂ’s participants include 235 who have secured steady jobs as a result.
The workshop is held at six locations: Union Gospel Mission, Salvation Army sites in Fort Worth and Arlington, Presbyterian Night Shelter, Day Resource Center for the Homeless and Patron House for Veterans.
After graduates begin their job searches, they are sent to First Street Methodist Mission to select appropriate interview attire from a “career closet,” Johnson said. He is developing a relationship with Men’s Warehouse to help graduates obtain career-ready clothing.
“It is understood now that quality of life in our city doesn’t just extend to the haves, but the have-nots as well,” Moncrief said. “Our city is only as rich as our poorest citizens, and only as strong as our weakest. It’s a different environment on East Lancaster now than it used to be, because now there’s a spark that has ignited: Hope. Hopelessness is probably even more difficult to treat than homelessness.”
