Ike Madu was at the Beacon, which provides meals, laundry, housing support and other resources to those without homes, when he met another man receiving services. The man told him what sounded to Madu like a tall tale: A story about his no-strings-attached gig with the county, where he was given breakfast and lunch and paid $15 an hour – sometimes to work and other times to receive counseling or get connected to resources.
Madu, 33, thought it was too good to be true. But he decided he would check it out, just in case.
Now, he spends Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays power washing and painting county property or packaging food at the Houston Food Bank through Employ2Empower, a county program that grew out of Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia’s office in partnership with the sheriff’s office and the nonprofit Career and Recovery Resources. On Thursdays, Madu attends resource workshops and gets paid for his time. It’s helped him get a state ID and arrange transportation to the places he needs to go.
He's done all this while still awaiting housing.
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Houston has drawn national attention for its success over the past decade with what’s known as a "housing-first" approach. The rationale goes that the only real solution to homelessness is housing, and that many contributing factors to homelessness, including unemployment, mental illness and addiction, are difficult to address until more basic needs are met. But a bottleneck in securing housing keeps many on the streets for months while they wait for apartments. And a large portion of people on the waiting list for housing fall off because they miss appointments or are hard for housing navigators to contact for follow ups. With all of this in mind, Garcia, from Precinct 2, has spearheaded what he calls an employment-first model.
“It surprised me that they helped,” Madu said of the program. “When I was growing up,” in Houston's South Park, south of Loop 610, “the police were the bad guys. Now they’re helping me with a second chance.”
Connection between employment and housing
Employ2Empower is meant to go hand-in-hand with the current system for navigating housing and other resources for those without homes, but it sets itself apart from those services in the way it engages with workers. The program's unique incentive of hourly wages gets people in need of housing to interact regularly with support staff, making it easier to connect them with resources and follow up about housing applications. It also eases them back into the workforce and teaches them specialized skills in a forgiving setting – workers are not given drug tests or penalized for missing days. What’s more, the program provides the county a significant savings on public maintenance work compared with what it would cost the county to hire a general contractor.
His latest program, Employ2Empower began in June of 2021 with a $150,000 pilot in Precinct 2. A nonprofit, Career and Recovery Resources, provided case management and human resource services, and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, where Garcia previously served as sheriff, provided supervision and security. Together, case managers and deputies visited encampments in parks and alongside freeways to recruit workers for the program.
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Career and Recovery Resources, which works to help people overcome barriers to employment, said the program was a natural fit.
“We could see the connection between employment and housing,” said Nkechi Agwuenu, the organization’s chief operational officer. “If you don’t have an address, you don’t have a bank account, you don’t have an ID, you have a criminal history – that makes it impossible to work.”
County commissioners deemed Employ2Empower a success and unanimously approved a countywide expansion of the program with a $2.1 million budget, using funds from a COVID-related federal stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan. It now has teams working to maintain county properties in Precincts 1, 2 and 3 – covering all of Harris County except a swath from Memorial Park west. That area, overseen by County Commissioner Jack Cagle, may opt into the program at a date, Garcia said.
Addressing barriers
The last time Madu had an address was a year and a half ago.
After his wife died, he said he fell into a deep depression, withdrawing from the world. He soon lost his job as a manager at Sonic. When it became clear he could not make rent, he walked away from his home and set up camp downtown – leaving behind his ID, birth certificate, social security card and other documents that are vital when trying to get a job or sign a lease on an apartment.
Employ2Empower let him join without that documentation, and also began addressing those barriers one by one. In addition to helping with documentation, it also connects workers with healthcare services, medication, help with housing applications and connections to job opportunities.
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While nearly all of the participants in Employ2Empower’s work crews have filled out a housing application at some point, only about 63 percent were actively on a wait list at the they joined the program, according to Agwuenu. That’s because so many had lost their spots when their housing navigators could not contact them. But Employ2Empower workers see their case managers every day they show up for the job.
Madu called the case managers “awesome,” saying, “You can talk about anything.”
On a recent Wednesday morning, Madu woke up at 6:30 a.m. and took two METRORail trains to the Career and Recovery Resources center, where the Employ2Empower bus picks up employees. There, he donned a highlighter yellow shirt and rode the bus to Jim and JoAnn Fonteno Family Park,
north of I-10 outside of Loop 610, where a number of shade structures had grown moldy over the years. The team had already power washed and primed the structures, and that day, they were ready to paint.
Harris County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Rick Medina, who had helped secure the scaffolding, served as the job’s project manager. He was familiar with the work from past experience overseeing a team in a similar program that worked with inmates. His purpose there was dual: to help direct and teach the workers and to look out for their safety.
Savings for county precincts
Troy Hogan, assistant superintendent for construction at Precinct 2, came out to the park and to review the worksite. He said that, before Employ2Empower started the job, he had had a contractor look at the site to quote how much it would take to repair the shade structures. The contractor had asked for $110,000. With Employ2Empower working on the project, only $500 -- the cost for supplies -- came out of Precinct 2's budget. The cost for operating the Employ2Empower crew for the eight weeks they worked on the project came out to roughly $49,000 in American Rescue Plan dollars, which covered payroll, breakfast and lunches, Career and Recovery Resources staff and fuel.
The costs were not directly comparable – the contractor would have also repaired some denting on the shade structures while Employ2Empower did not.
Nonetheless, Hogan said, “It’s been a substantial savings.” For another project, restriping the parking lot of a community center in Pasadena, he had been quoted $4,500, and Employ2Empower did it in two days with paint the county already had on hand.
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January count of the homeless population in Harris County found roughly 3,000 without homes; Employ2Empower, which caps each work crew at 10 people, can only serve a fraction of them. The expansion and long term health of the program will not only depend on finding enough work to do by partnering with employers who understand the program and its the rules that apply to its workforce. It also depends on securing funding after the American Rescue Plan Act dollars, which are finite and must be obligated by the end of 2024. Garcia said he was hopeful a more sustainable source of funding – an annual grant to cities, counties and states to improve lives for those with low and moderate incomes known as a Community Development Block Grant – could be used for the program in the future.
Meanwhile, the Employ2Empower crew got down to business at Fonteno Family Park. Hector Fuentes, 36, helped wrangle the scaffolding through the gate. Bobby McQuietor, 60, helped secure the scaffold while Fuentes quickly scaled it and began painting.
McQuietor had lost his previous job as a roofer when his car broke down and he could no longer get to his job sites. He’d been on the housing list for four months, he said, and had difficulty finding other work without a home because “nobody wants you to come to work smelly.” So he was happy when Career and Recovery Resources came by the stretch of sidewalk where he had been sleeping and offered him a job.
Fuentes called down to him – “You do know I’m the fastest one here, right?”
Madu smiled at their banter, then picked up a paint brush of his own.
rebecca.schuetz@chron.com;
twitter.com/raschuetz
