Local government program helps families escape grip of poverty

BRISTOL, Va. – Brook Blaylock-Smith spent her adolescence living in public housing. By the age of 19, she had three children and a life littered with bad relationships and worse financial decisions.

She tried twice – and failed – to move out of public housing.

“People always tell you that you reap what you sow and you pay for every decision or every choice that you make in life, and I believe that is 100 percent true,” Blaylock-Smith said.

After reaching that realization, she made another decision: She wanted off public assistance. She said she woke up one morning determined to change everything.

“I don’t think there’s anything that anybody cannot do,” Blaylock-Smith said. “I think that we all have amazing strength and abilities if those are nursed or nurtured in the appropriate way.”

Still, raising all three of her children on her own, Blaylock-Smith now has a bachelor’s degree in social work and is an independent living advocate for the Appalachian Independence Center – a job that allows her to help others overcome challenges.

She also is preparing to move out of public housing. Thanks to a three-year-old program called Find a Way, she was able to save for the down payment on a home of her own.

Oh, she still counts pennies, she admits, but now she has peace of mind.

“The only thing that stops us from doing most of what we want to do is ourselves,” she said.

The programs

Find a Way is a program of the Bristol Redevelopment and Housing Authority that assists public housing residents who want to move out and move up. With 35 families now enrolled, the program stresses goal-setting, employment and life-skills training.

People Incorporated, based in Abingdon, Va., provides a similar service: a Transitional Housing Program that requires participants to work or pursue education while living in assisted housing and progressing toward a stable living situation. The program has 22 families and 69 individuals enrolled.

“I absolutely believe that individuals can come from impoverished situations and limited educational skills and be able to come and use our resources” and improve their lives, said Ginger Henderson, transitional housing coordinator for People Inc.

Using financial support and grants from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, both programs work with a small number of the 62,000-plus Southwest Virginia residents who receive government assistance, mostly in the
form of food stamps.

The two programs serve a region where the number of people living at poverty levels or below ranges from 15.7 percent in Washington County to 20.3 percent in Wise County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Henderson said the first step to moving those residents from welfare to self-sufficiency is helping them recognize the difference between wants and needs.
There’s a long waiting line for the nonprofit agency’s program, she said, including 104 families and 322 individuals, but all of its clients have found employment within two to three weeks of enrolling.

And last year, People Inc. reports, 75 percent of its clients were able to reduce their debt and meet savings goals.

“What we want to see is the client transition from the program to a stable living environment,” said Bryan Phipps, People Inc.’s vice president for development.

David Baldwin, executive director of the Bristol Redevelopment and Housing Authority, said his agency’s program and others like it, including People Inc., are based on one critical belief.

“There are a lot of folks who have been in difficult circumstances for a lot of their life that just don’t feel like they have the energy and the willpower to improve,” Baldwin said.

“Sometimes, we just have to let people know, ‘You can do it!’”

Desire to change

Rachel Banks and her husband arrived in Abingdon with nothing.

After her husband lost his job in Montana, they crammed their family possessions into a 26-foot U-Haul truck and drove to Alabama, where they again tried to make a living, and again failed. Broke, with no jobs and no home, and with Rachel Banks pregnant with their third child, the family returned to her hometown and sought help.

“We just blew money like it was going out of style, so when an emergency happened, we didn’t have anything,” Banks said of their life while they were employed. “We didn’t have an emergency fund, we didn’t have any sort of backup plan.”

But she and her husband were determined. They sought help from the Virginia Department of Social Services, then landed in a People Inc. transitional housing apartment in Lebanon, Va.

“Life is what you make it,” Banks said. “You can either sit around and be unhappy with who you are and where you are in life, or you can go out there and make the best of it, and all you can do is try to succeed, and if you don’t succeed at first, try again.”

A few short years later, the fixer-upper that the Banks family managed to buy in an old Abingdon subdivision is looking like a home. Rachel Banks said it’s an example of what is possible once you set your mind to a goal.

Transitional keys

Anyone who has the desire can turn their life around, Baldwin said. And the first, critical step is to establish goals.

“Folks need to really take stock of where they are in their lives and think about where they want to be in five years,” Baldwin said. “And work toward achieving their goals.”

Thanks to the support of People Inc.’s Transitional Housing Program, the Banks family now knows how to budget and plan for the future.

“They had a lot of classes to help with simple things like watching your money and that sort of thing,” Rachel Banks said. “With their encouragement ... we were able to save money and bought our own house in 2006 in December.”

Such milestones are key to measuring the work of both programs.

“Ultimate success is when a family is no longer receiving public assistance of any kind, including public housing,” Baldwin said. “So when they achieve a level of income that would allow them to move into the private market ... we think they’re a success.”

But there are many steps in between, Baldwin said.

“We also consider it a success if a family who is not employed gets a full-time job,” he said.

Steps to change

When Blaylock-Smith enrolled in the Bristol Housing Authority’s Find a Way program, she was already in her second year of college and making steps toward self-sufficiency – but, she said, the emotional support the program offers has been invaluable.

Clients are provided help with seeking higher education, child care and transportation issues, budgeting and bank accounts, homemaking skills, job training, interviewing and resume-writing.

And as those skills translate into higher incomes, the public housing residents see rent increases – but the additional rent is deposited in a special bank account for the client’s future. Though managed by the authority, once the program participant has lived a year without government financial support, they can access their saved money.

At People Inc.’s Transitional Housing Program, Henderson said, program participants must be employed or enrolled in an education program and must pay a program fee, which starts at $50 a month plus a portion of utilities. They also must participate in weekly meetings with a case manager who can coach them on such issues as money management, child care and home maintenance.

They, too, can put money into a special savings account, managed by People Inc., that later can be used to buy a home, return to school or start a business.

Henderson said her clients come from a variety of circumstances: domestic violence, house fire victims, those in debt over their heads, and young people who simply lack the skills to manage a household.

Planning for the future

Banks and Blaylock-Smith both caution that working to support their families hasn’t suddenly made life perfect, but they have a new sense of pride and confidence about what they might be able to achieve.

“When you have as many kids as I do and you go for as long as I did with very limited income, you kind of become accustomed to making not-so-smart choices when it comes to money, and I got into a big mess with payday advances,” Blaylock-Smith said. “I fell flat on my face, but it’s taken a long time to get everything situated and get my head right where I expected more of myself.”

Blaylock-Smith credits Lynn Pannell, self-sufficiency coordinator for the Housing Authority, with helping her find a way out of the financial mess.

Most of all, she talks about her kids – Raegan, 13, Aly, 10, and Chandler, 8 – and what she hopes they’ve gained by making sacrifices with her to improve the family’s way of life.

She said she wants her children to have a better life, improved character – and to grow up to take good care of their own families. The work she does now, she said, will lay a good foundation for her children’s future.

Banks, whose family also suffers from past spending habits and bad debt, said she now knows it’s important to plan for the future – and spend only for what’s important.

“We wanted to basically break our own cycle,” she said. “We wanted to raise our kids in an environment where we’re working and we’re instilling in our kids the value of work. We really just started focusing on God, and when we did, things fell into place.”

Moving forward

Banks’ husband is working at Sprint’s Bristol call center. She was working as a bookkeeper for a speech therapist whose office is closing, and she plans to keep working part-time at a new job to continue contributing to her family’s finances.

She is optimistic about her future. There is more they want to accomplish, she said – such as saving for their kids to attend college – and sometimes they still struggle financially, but slowly they are improving their lot in life.

All three of the family’s children – Katlyn, 9, Kylie, 5, and Kassie, 4 – help out as well.

“We are basically doing one project at a time … to improve the quality of our home,” said Banks, whose house needed new wiring, plumbing and a full coat of paint before the family could move in, but has since gained a heating and air system, new light fixtures, new windows and an effort to dry out the
basement.

“Since we’ve had our own home we’ve received no assistance, we don’t receive food stamps, we don’t receive Medicaid, nothing like that,” Banks said. “We have our own private insurance, we’ve got two [older] vehicles that we’ve bought and paid for.

“I think anybody can do anything they want with the right attitude,” she said, “and being able to ask for help.”

| (276) 791-0701