By: AIF Staff
Since his time working for Jack Kemp (R-NY) and through his two decades in Congress, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan has been committed to finding solutions that promote upward mobility and expand economic opportunities. As he worked on these issues, Ryan concluded that in order to break through the partisan paralysis gripping Congress and to better fight poverty, the federal government needed to modernize how it collected, shared and utilized collected, shared, and utilized evidence and data when it came to social programs.
This dual desire to help Americans move up the ladder of life and to do so in an academically rigorous and quantifiable way is why the American Idea Foundation has partnered with local organizations working to solve our nation’s biggest challenges. In addition to providing policy expertise and public awareness about promising solutions, the American Idea Foundation has supported 20 organizations in the last 3 years with grants to help fund evidence-based research.
In 2024, one of the organizations that the American Idea Foundation is partnering with is Family Promise of West Michigan.
Family Promise is focused on ending homelessness by connecting families in need with a suite of services like providing supplies to meet their basic needs, offering access to family support and emergency services, and creating customized stabilization efforts. Family Promise of West Michigan is a Grand Rapids-based affiliate of a national organization that is committed to helping the 2.5 million children who will experience homelessness this year.
Family Promise of West Michigan, founded in 1997 as the Greater Grand Rapids Interfaith Hospitality Network, partners with local congregations, individuals, families, foundations and corporations to provide emergency shelter and viable solutions for families with children who are facing a housing crisis. Family Promise is a diversion program to prevent homelessness and they work specifically with individuals and families who are at an immediate risk of becoming homeless, rather than people experiencing chronic homelessness, to mitigate homelessness happening in the first place.
Family Promise does this by utilizing a case management model which means providing individualized, wrap-around support for families and their children during times of great need. The individuals who Family Promise of West Michigan helps are seeking urgent assistance with basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter and Family Promise works tirelessly to address their immediate problems while identifying long-term solutions for shelter.
Family Promise tries to divert clients away from homelessness and costly shelter stays by instead providing them with alternative temporary housing options. Most individuals who enter emergency shelters tend to remain homeless longer which is why Family Promise seeks to intervene before that occurs, operating with a lighter touch and supporting individuals as they find alternatives like short-term rental housing or staying with family and friends.
The hope is that, if individuals do not enter homeless shelters because of support provided by groups like Family Promise of West Michigan, they will bounce back faster and stabilize their housing needs. This intervention is important for adults, but also critical for their children because youth who experience homelessness are 20% less likely to graduate high school than their peers.
This video testimonial speaks to the important work being done by Family Promise of West Michigan as they work to end homelessness in Michigan, one family at a time.
As Family Promise’s 2022 Annual Impact Report makes clear, the group is making an enormous difference locally and nationally.
– In 2022, because of Family Promise’s prevention program which provides services like rental assistance, landlord mediation, and case management, 44,000 children nation-wide avoided being homeless.
– In 2022, Family Promise provided more than 5,000 families and nearly 16,000 individuals with emergency shelter and of those, approximately 78% exited towards more stable housing. A marked increase over families in traditional shelter environments.
Nationally, Family Promise served 241,313 individuals including 88,349 children at their 200 affiliates across the country, including West Michigan. As the program continues to grow, they are also determined to refine their programming in an evidence-based way so it can help even more children and families find stable housing.
For the past year, Family Promise of West Michigan, Family Promise of Spokane, and the Lord’s Place (located in West Palm Beach) have been working with Notre Dame’s Laboratory for Economic Opportunities (LEO) on a randomized control trial to study how flexible financial assistance during diversion conversations impacts housing shelter use, housing stability issues, and other outcomes.
The goal is to determine if individuals who are diverted from homeless shelters, largely through financial assistance or other support services, will have increased housing stability and improved outcomes in terms of income, employment, overall well-being.
Funds provided by the American Idea Foundation will help complete this study and advance the base of evidence on homeless diversion programs so they can be refined and scaled, if appropriate, to assist more families and children find permanenting housing from which they can build stable and productive lives.
To learn more about the American Idea Foundation’s 2024 grant recipients, click here.