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Save the Family is teaching self-sufficiency to homeless
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Tim Koors/The Arizona Republic
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Cindy Bracy and her two girls, Olivia, 9 months, and Rebekah, 2, spent 3 months in homeless shelters before finding Save the Family.
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By Maggie Galehouse
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 16, 2001 12:00:00
Cindy Bracy had $149 in her pocket, a baby in her arms and another on the way when she fled her abusive husband in Billings, Mont., 16 months ago.
Bracy, 31, didn't know what would happen once she got to Arizona. All she knew is that God didn't want her to be a doormat or punching bag anymore.
Frightened, exhausted and strapped for cash after three days on the road, Bracy hit another hurdle when she got to Mesa, one that nearly 2 million Americans face every year.
She and her family were homeless.
"I was at the bottom and had nowhere to go," Bracy said. "I had no self-respect, no job, and I was cut off from my family."
On any given day in Arizona, 30,000 people are homeless. Domestic violence, poverty, mental illness, substance abuse and lack of affordable housing are the most common reasons for homelessness.
Cuts in federal housing programs, stricter requirements for welfare eligibility, and a stagnating minimum wage have pushed up the number of homeless families in the past few decades, said Barbara Duffield, director of education for the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C.
"This is not an age-old problem," Duffield said. "Homeless families didn't start showing up on the map until the mid-1980s."
Mark Holleran, chief executive officer of Central Arizona Shelter Services, which serves 400 people a day at its downtown shelter and 200 families a year at its Sunnyslope facility, said the problem started earlier in the Valley.
In the 1970s, when people started moving to the suburbs and business construction started to boom, more than 30 motels in central Phoenix with cheap daily and weekly rates were leveled, Holleran said. Those demolitions displaced low-income singles and families who couldn't afford to go anywhere else.
Cindy Bracy and daughters Rebekah, 2, and Olivia, 10 months, were lucky. They never had to sleep in the family truck. After a few tension-filled weeks with friends, followed by three months in a motel that had been converted to a shelter, Bracy found a solution.
Save the Family Foundation came to her rescue by teaching her how to rescue herself.
Based in Mesa, Save the Family provides transitional housing for homeless families with children, reaching 153 families and about 360 children in Mesa, Tempe, Chandler and Scottsdale each year.
It is one of many agencies that will benefit from Season for Sharing, The Arizona Republic's annual fund-raising campaign. Save the Family reports a 91 percent success rate.
In addition to transitional housing, Save the Family offers classes to prepare clients psychologically and professionally for self-sufficiency.
"I've learned about boundaries," said Bracy, happily ensconced in a bright, two-bedroom house with her two children. "I've learned that I have my own principles, my own beliefs, morals and values. I've learned that no one will respect you if you don't have respect for yourself."
Persistence and a positive attitude are critical to surviving homelessness, Duffield said.
"So many people get beaten down by the different social service systems," she said. "You have to jump through millions of hoops to prove you're worthy of help. Be as assertive as you can be. Don't give up."
Save the Family requires clients to take steps toward self-sufficiency. For some, that means holding down a 40-hour-a-week job. For others, it means working on a general equivalency diploma.
A caseworker visits families in their homes every week, with everything focused on preparing families for life after transitional living, said Kate Bach, director of community relations.
But as the economy grows weaker and the number of homeless families grows larger, that is increasingly difficult to do. Minimum-wage jobs and peripheral support positions are the first to go in a bad economy. And from a cash flow standpoint, it's hard for some families to come up with a down payment for a house or apartment.
Housing affordability is an impending crisis in Arizona. Statewide housing prices and rents are rising twice as fast as incomes, the Arizona Housing Commission wrote in a 2000 report. By 2003, 40 percent of all new jobs are expected to pay less than half of the livable wage, while the service and retail sectors, traditionally among the lowest-paying, are projected to grow the fastest.
But there is some hope for progress.
The Maricopa Association of Governments is discussing creating a campus for the homeless where services could be consolidated and the population would not be forced to commute to different sites for different services.
Cindy Bracy is relentlessly optimistic.
She just got laid off from Light Company Players, a dinner theater in Mesa where she earned a commission on the seats she sold. So she is spending her holidays with the classified ads, pounding the pavement for temporary work.
"I'm a go-getter," said Bracy, who taught dance when she and her estranged husband lived in Los Angeles. "It's not a problem."
Bracy also got her Section 8 voucher last week, one of the last steps toward getting her own home.
She has already picked it out: a two-bedroom place across the street from where she lives now.
Last week she paid the $300 security deposit. And with a little luck, along with $1,250 for first and last month's rent, she and her girls will be on their own by the end of January.
"I'm going on faith," Bracy said with a big smile.
Reach the reporter at maggie.galehouse@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8124.
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