Across the Continuum of Care: Transitional Housing Programs in the Midwest

Abstract

For the next stop on our tour, we travel to Michigan . The state of Michigan offers a dramatic counterpoint and distinctive ecological context when compared with our Mississippi case study . Situated squarely in the Midwest , Michigan is the original home of the American automobile industry.

For the next stop on our tour, we travel to Michigan . The state of Michigan offers a dramatic counterpoint and distinctive ecological context when compared with our Mississippi case study . Situated squarely in the Midwest , Michigan is the original home of the American automobile industry. As a stronghold of American labor unions , Michigan features an intriguing political mix. The more politically progressive urban areas of the state are complemented by rural areas that tend toward political and religious conservatism. And, during the past several decades, the state has struggled mightily with de-industrialization given the movement of domestic manufacturing overseas. Hence, in shifting our attention from Mississippi to Michigan , we have effectively moved from the Bible Belt to what some have dubbed the Rust Belt . We have also fixed our gaze on transitional housing initiatives, thereby indicating a change in focus with respect to programmatic content . The economic fallout of de-industrialization in Michigan amplified the housing crisis triggered by the mortgage-driven recession that began in 2008. Housing values in Michigan plummeted, and the state has yet to recover fully.

While statistical figures never tell the full story of homelessness, they do provide a lens on the scope of this problem within the state. Estimates suggest that Michigan had over 100,000 homeless citizens in 2010.¹ Of course, this figure may be an undercount given the difficulties presented in arriving at accurate calculations of such a transient population. And the challenges faced by Michigan ’s homeless population are considerably more perilous than those confronted by their counterparts in many other parts of the country. With the Great Lakes regularly dropping snow on local communities and Alberta Clipper weather patterns periodically bringing very cold weather during long winters, homelessness is a dangerous matter for Michigan residents.

In both conservative and liberal Michigan religious traditions, serving the poor, the sick, and the homeless is taken quite literally. When public services for this population have proven to be inadequate, congregations in many Michigan communities have often taken matters into their own hands. Congregations provide emergency shelters for the homeless through the innovative use of their buildings and physical facilities, often rotating temporary shelters among buildings and across congregations . Additionally, many of these same congregations support these emergency housing initiatives with armies of volunteers who provide direct services to homeless people and, as needed, move equipment necessary to sustain these shelters. In many communities, makeshift domiciles have evolved into more permanent shelters run by community-based nonprofits , some of which retain their faith-based character.

This chapter explores the provision of transitional housing services to families in one mid-sized city in Michigan . Table 4.1 provides a brief description of the five programs whose services are examined in this chapter. As can be noted from Table 4.1, four programs are faith-based , albeit to varying extents, while the fifth is a secular program. And although most programs are supported by a measure of public funding, there is a program—Mary’s House —that is supported solely through private donations . In 2012, the region where the programs in this study are located was estimated to have over 13,000 homeless persons, nearly one third of them children.²

Table 4.1 Michigan transitional housing programs

Consistent with research conducted in Mississippi (Chap. 3) and the Washington -Oregon area (Chap. 5), in-depth interviews with staff and focus group interviews with program participants were the primary means for investigating transitional housing program dynamics. However, given the continued functioning of transitional housing programs in Michigan , this chapter has the added benefit of featuring a combination of initial data collected in 2003 and follow-up data collected in 2010–2011. (As noted in Chap. 3, comparable follow-up data could not be collected in the Mississippi case study .) By 2011, all but one of the transitional housing programs in the initial wave of the study had new directors and workers. And, of the five original programs, one faith-based program—part of a much larger multi-service agency—was no longer functioning. While we are careful not to draw sweeping generalizations from this geographically situated study of transitional housing, the additional data enrich our understanding of the complex relationship between faith and funding. For the purposes of comparability with our case study of Mississippi parenting programs and Washington -Oregon addiction recovery programs, this investigation is animated by the same series of questions: (1) What similarities and differences are exhibited among faith-based and secular programs, particularly with respect to transitional housing program objectives and the strategies used to achieve them? (2) How, if at all, is funding related to the ways in which transitional housing programs are conducted? Is public funding linked to distinctive service provision strategies in transitional housing programs?

Once again, these empirical questions are explored with due attention to our theoretical considerations, namely, the three C’s of service provision (programmatic content , organizational culture , and ecological context) . Programmatic content in this chapter departs from that of the previous chapter because transitional housing programs have a much different focus than parent education . While parent education programs principally deliver a skills-based service to their clients, the primary focus of transitional housing is on the provision of material goods, namely, a physical residence and, sometimes, other tangible resources such as clothing. Still, life skills such as budgeting, employment referrals, and even parenting classes also may be offered to support the likelihood of attaining and maintaining housing and, at times, to foster clients’ quality of life.

Moreover, the argument could be made that organizational culture is even more influential in transitional housing programs because clients have more sustained contact—in the form of actual residence—with the agency that serves them. And, as has already been indicated, the distinctions in ecological context (broader community factors, economic forces, religious markets) vary dramatically as we move from the agricultural climes of rural Mississippi to the industrial setting of this Michigan city. Before digging into the particulars of our Michigan cases, some attention to prior research on transitional housing is warranted.

4.1 Key Insights from Previous Research on Transitional Housing

Although temporary shelters assure safety in the cold of winter, longer-term housing is a preferable solution. Housing instability is particularly disruptive to families with children, as it can undermine children’s educational achievement³ and social development.⁴ Transitional housing programs are often structured to assist specific segments of the homeless population. Some programs are gender -specific (e.g., targeted at serving men or women), while others aim to provide housing for families with children. Still others are focused on assisting people who are especially vulnerable to homelessness, such as veterans, persons recovering from substance abuse, or those living with a mental illness . Transitional housing programs aim to empower homeless people by teaching independent living skills while providing a stable residence.⁵ Transitional housing programs have been found effective in inculcating skills such as budgeting, communication, technical job training, interviewing, resume writing, and leadership skills.⁶ Other benefits include networking, housing referrals, and counseling services for program participants.⁷ Some transitional housing programs have helped clients gain and maintain long-term permanent employment and housing while teaching problem-solving techniques to cope with social, emotional, and economic difficulties.⁸ These successful programs followed earlier federal initiatives that met with more limited success.⁹

What, then, can be said of faith-based housing programs? Available evidence is limited, but suggests that faith-based housing programs can provide critical resources to their clients (e.g., job assistance, residence, transportation, benefits access), particularly for the chronically homeless.¹⁰ Faith-based service providers vary in the degree to which they explicitly integrate religious components into their assistance efforts. However, they generally offer intangible forms of support such as hope and spiritual development,¹¹ with positive client outcomes in emotional well-being (e.g., sense of efficacy) and behavioral health (e.g., reduced drug use and sexual risk).¹² Religious individuals often report the greatest benefit in religious programs, while secular services are rated well for providing a supportive environment .¹³

Direct comparisons between faith-based and secular providers of transitional housing are few in number. As noted in Chap. 2, a study in Grand Rapids, Michigan found some indications of a more holistic orientation among faith-based providers.¹⁴ Faith-based staff persons were generally viewed as more caring and motivated by values such as justice, dignity, and spiritual development. However, questions remain about the meaning of the term holistic in the Grand Rapids study and, more broadly, in the field of welfare service provision. As we and other researchers¹⁵ have noted, the term holistic can be defined quite differently by various service providers, clients, or researchers. On the one hand, holistic can entail addressing clients’ spiritual welfare along with more practical targets for improvement. On the other hand, holistic can be defined as bundling together an array of services—none of them spiritual—to meet a broad set of practical needs exhibited by clients (housing, food assistance , employment counseling, medical care, etc.). Therefore, considerable caution is warranted in concluding that faith-based services are provided to homeless persons in a more holistic fashion.

Transitional housing programs, which typically provide support and housing for up to two years, remain part of the broader effort to help homeless people achieve permanent housing. However, in more recent years, homelessness researchers and advocates have begun questioning the efficiency and effectiveness of the transitional housing model.¹⁶ Consequently, an alternative Housing First model has gained ground in the past decade or so. The Housing First model is predicated on the provision of longer-term, even permanent, housing and jettisons common transitional housing stipulations such as demonstrated client sobriety prior to placement in a residence.¹⁷ The persistent prevalence of chronic homelessness—repeated spells of homelessness evident among 10% of the broader homeless population, many of whom have mental health and substance abuse conditions—has contributed to the rise of the Housing First approach.¹⁸ This approach views stable housing as a foundational, first-order resource and precursor to other changes in life circumstances and behaviors.¹⁹ The Housing First approach is different than the transitional programs featured in this chapter. The Housing First approach has considerably more front-end investment costs, which are largely prohibitive for faith-based organizations or community-based nonprofits . Still, government run Housing First programs have met with some success that includes reduced hospital stays and incarceration.²⁰ Impacts on substance use and mental health, to date, have not been as positive.²¹

4.2 The Faith-Funding Nexus in Transitional Housing: Evidence of an Elective Affinity

Our turn to transitional housing in Michigan fixes our focus on more tangible dimensions of programmatic content . Few things are more tangible than the brick and mortar resources that housing programs need to survive, along with the money that is necessary to provide a domicile to homeless persons. Where transitional housing in Michigan is concerned, there is an elective affinity between funding source and the centrality of faith in programming. The idea of an elective affinity was initially introduced into the social science lexicon by the early twentieth century sociologist Max Weber²² in his analyses of cultural values and distinctive historical trajectories. An elective affinity , translated from German as kindred by choice, is the tendency for two otherwise distinct phenomena—in Weber’s famous case, theological convictions and economic arrangements—to be coupled or linked together. The case of transitional housing programs in Michigan suggests the presence of an elective affinity between faith components of a program and its funding (the faith-funding nexus, for short). This elective affinity generally works out as follows: exclusively private funding is linked to faith-intensive programs while public funding is more prominent in programs that have a faith-related character. The discussion that follows illustrates that faith-related programs whose parameters for offering overtly religious program content already align with the guidelines of public funding have little reason to limit those sources of funding, while faith-intensive programs refuse it.²³

On the side of the continuum that composes the faith-funding nexus is faith-intensive Mary’s House . Expressions of faith are infused into virtually every facet of programmatic content and organizational culture at Mary’s House . Within this agency, faith figures into determinations about the clients chosen to receive services. At Mary’s House , the values of a client—and her openness to participation in faith-oriented activities—can affect the receipt of services, such that a religious client will be seen as more aligned with the values of the organization. Faith also plays a prominent role in the actual provision of services, with Mary’s House clear from the outset about its emphasis on religious participation (e.g., prayer , worship ). The cultural ties at Mary’s House are binding and obligatory, factors for which this agency does not apologize. In fact, the employees at Mary’s House are themselves quite religious, talking quite openly about their faith commitments during field interviews .

Faith-intensive Mary’s House reported an annual operating budget of $85,000 in 2010, all of which was privately donated. Mary’s House intentionally steers clear of public funding, choosing instead to draw private support from a network of about forty local churches and private donations from various benefactors. While these churches provide monetary donations , this entrepreneurial agency is also noteworthy for its enlistment of in-kind donations . In-kind donations are non-monetary materials or services that nonprofits use to enhance the implementation of their programs. At Mary’s House , in-kind donations often take the form of baby supplies, furniture, and basic household goods that stock the homes in which participants live. In short, Mary’s House is an excellent example of how a commitment to private funding, in-kind donations , and a willingness to stay small can be quite intentional in order to allow faith-intensive programming. Leaders at Mary’s House relish the freedom to integrate faith into their programming as they wish without the strictures or expectations that accompany government funding.

The financial circumstances at Mary’s House also reveal how operating budgets have both an objective and subjective character. In an objective sense, the budget at Mary’s House is rather meager. Among the programs featured in this study, Mary’s House has the smallest annual operating budget , a mere one percent of the agency with the largest operating budget . However, for faith-intensive Mary’s House , the objective dollar value of the budget is less important than the subjective cultural value of remaining unfettered from government regulations, thereby allowing the freedom to pursue their program’s religious content. In this way, the unflinching religious convictions that undergird programming at Mary’s House and that form the core of this agency’s organizational culture are given a higher priority than the size of its operating budget . Therefore, the old saying, “Where you stand depends on where you sit” applies. Where people stand at Mary’s House (acceptance of the size of their budget ) is very much a product of where they sit (their unflagging commitment to the religious values at the heart of their organization’s culture).

Beyond the question of dollar values versus cultural values , evaluations of the budget at Mary’s House are very much a matter of perspective. The operating budget at Mary’s House may seem rather small to the onlooker when compared with other transitional housing programs in the area. However, perhaps budget comparisons are not the appropriate measure of success. At Mary’s House , such comparisons clearly do not win the day. Staff persons at Mary’s House are quite content with the unambiguously faith-based quality of the services they offer and the faith-driven values and outcomes they seek. To this point, the budget at Mary’s House grew by an impressive 70% from 2003 to 2010 (see Table 4.2). The expansion of a $50,000 annual budget in 2003 to about $85,000 in 2010 is all the more impressive when considering the impact of the Great Recession , which began at the close of 2008, on funding in the nonprofit world. So, in this regard, Mary’s House can be seen as programmatically robust and, within their cultural context, financially successful.

Table 4.2 Michigan transitional housing agencies’ funding sources and budgets

By contrast, the largest faith-based program in terms of the number of clients served at the initial point of data collection was Hope House . Hope House was a program with a budget of $130,000, almost all from public grants, including those received from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Hope House was capable of serving up to sixteen women and their children at one time. Hope House also received considerable in-kind donations from private sources. Such donations included Christmas gifts for residents and their children from a local women’s service club.

The shift to the past tense in reviewing the programming dynamics at Hope House is intentional. By the time follow-up fieldwork was conducted in 2010, Hope House was closed. Although the housing part of the program was gone, some elements of Hope House ’s supportive services were absorbed into another program within its Church Affiliated Social Services (CASS) parent agency. While Hope House ’s program budget of $130,000 may seem large in comparison to, say, Mary’s House (total operating budget of $85,000), Hope House ’s budget represented less than 1.5% of the total agency budget at CASS . In spite of closing Hope House , the community’s largest transitional housing program for women with children, the larger agency is still operating numerous other types of other programs for families and children.

The disparate trajectories exhibited by Mary’s House and Hope House underscore an important insight. The assumption is sometimes made that privately funded programs are quite vulnerable given their reliance on the benevolence of private philanthropic support. However, in this case, privately funded Mary’s House was able to withstand the adverse effects of the economic downturn because it had cultivated durable relationships with private donors who were committed to its sustainability through the Great Recession . By contrast, CASS ’s reliance solely on a public revenue stream to fund Hope House seems to have led to the program being dismantled.

The remaining three programs, one secular and the others faith-related (less intensively religious), reported a mix of private and public funding that was similar across agencies and that generally remained consistent within each agency at both points in time (2003 and 2010). All three of these agencies had and continued to have relatively balanced revenue sources. Where public funding was concerned, Faith House received 58% of its funding from government sources in 2003, compared with 57% in 2010. Secular Hospitality House was similarly consistent across time (48% from government funds in 2003, compared with 45% in 2010). In short, these organizations managed to maintain nearly identical proportions of public funding sources over the two points in time, a feat that Hope House could not accomplish. Charity House experienced a relative decrease in government sources of funding as a proportion of the total agency budget (from 62% of its budget in 2003 to 40% in 2010). Much of this change was due to an increase in private funding, although there was a small reduction in public funding. An important conclusion to draw from these patterns is that these community-based organizations had the ability to increase private funding in a poor economy. Indeed, all four of the smaller agencies saw increases in their overall budgets during this time, while the much larger agency, CASS , experienced a significant retrenchment (discussed in more detail below).

An examination of agency financial documentation also proved to be quite revealing. For two agencies, there were differences between director reports and IRS annual 990 reports of funding sources. Faith House ’s director overstated government funding as 70% of the agency budget , while the director of Charity House stated that they received no public funding except for a small stipend from the state. The latter estimated that 85% of her agency’s budget was generated from private donations . However, the 990 tax forms showed much less public funding for Faith House and much more for Charity House . Because both 990s were prepared by professional accounting firms, these reports seem more likely to reflect funding sources accurately.

Possible explanations about the curiously divergent perspectives on government funding and possible implications about organizational identity can be discerned from disparities in the stated versus actual revenue streams of social service agencies. Two possible explanations point in quite different directions. First, while we are not in a position to impute motive, an organization that begrudgingly relies on government funding might be inclined to minimize its dependence on public revenue streams for the same reason that welfare is decried, namely, that the receipt of such funds is contrary to self-reliance and highly subject to the direction that political winds happen to be blowing. Within such agencies, purchase-of-service contracts with government entities might be viewed as a sort of Faustian bargain at best, leading to an understatement of its reliance on governmental support. Within the context of these executive directors’ comments about government funds, this explanation seems unlikely. Second, there is also the possibility that faith-based agencies that temper faith elements in their programs even as they accept government funding simply do not find the role of government funding of enough concern to dissuade them from pursuing such revenue streams. Additionally, if funding is filtered through intermediary organizations, it might be viewed as non-public funding. Of course, it is possible that a combination of these two interpretations is the best explanation of the discrepancy observed here.

Rather surprisingly, Hospitality House , the only secular program, received proportionately less public money than any of the publicly funded faith-based groups initially. In 2003, public funds received by Hospitality amounted to less than half of its total operating budget . By 2010, Hospitality House still trailed these two faith-based organizations in the proportion of funds drawn from a public source. Faith-based organizations that pursued public funding typically received it for the agency as a whole. Relying quite heavily on private grants and donations , very little of Hospitality’s private funding came from religious sources.

The budget for CASS , the parent agency of the ultimately closed Hope House , reveals a very different picture from the other organizations. Unlike the other agencies, this large agency with an initial budget of approximately $10 million had seen a reduction in revenue of nearly $1 million or 10% between 2003 and 2010 (see Table 4.1). This lost revenue equaled at least twice the total budget of any of the other organizations. Further, the proportion of public funding is very different. At CASS , an agency that is part of a faith-based national federation, public funding increased from 78% of its total budget to 85%, with the latter being much greater than any of the other agencies. Here, as in other ways, the remaining agencies resembled each other far more than they resembled CASS . While a range of explanations are certainly possible, sheer organizational size seems a likely suspect, more so than faith-based content as an influencing factor with respect to the ability of agencies to preserve their transitional housing programs. In this particular case, heavy reliance on government grants seems to have left a large program in a large agency vulnerable to closing programs even though the larger agency seems to have survived the downsizing fairly intact. It is unknown how loss of the much smaller transitional programs at any of the other agencies might have affected the agency’s survival, or whether any of the others could have survived retrenchment to smaller budgets as did this larger organization.

4.3 Government Funding and Faith Intensity in Transitional Housing Programs

As noted in Chaps. 3 and 5 and reaffirmed in this chapter, there is an elective affinity between government funding and the content of social service programs. The transitional housing programs examined here shed additional light on this issue. When public funding was secured, the programs and agencies were affected by the requirements of funding. Among transitional housing programs featured here, the receipt of public funds was due to leadership’s willingness to limit inclusion of religious elements in programs. Thus, public funding was not perceived as a barrier or unacceptable sacrifice for any provider except the most overtly religious program.

That one program, Mary’s House , insisted on the freedom to include religion and mandates for religious participation in its program in a manner of its own choosing. For Mary’s House staff and board, the regulation of religion that would be imposed with public funding was viewed as incompatible with the mission of the agency. Thus, given the centrality of religious values to the organizational culture at Mary’s House , this agency chose and still chooses not to accept any public funds. In doing so, they remain free to offer Christianity and even require Bible study and attendance at worship as integral parts of its intervention with the women it served. In this way, then, Mary’s House was influenced by public funding, if only by its persistent opposition to the pursuit of those funds. In 2003, the director of Mary’s House put the matter this way.

We made an active decision to be faith-based … It gives us the freedom to make the girls go to church on Sunday, to offer Christianity … We reach fewer girls. It limits what is offered here. It’s hard to find people who’ll work for the money. We can’t afford [hiring] our own counselor.

When asked how the acceptance of public funds would likely affect their program, the 2010 director of Mary’s House offered comments that resonate with those of her predecessor.

We don’t want to have to give up our focus on religion and talking to the women about Christ. So we don’t accept government funding because then you have to get into what you can and can’t say to your residents. We’ve also [confronted this situation] since United Way changed their, they made a change [that] they don’t want you talking about religion either. So we are not even affiliated with them. It’s very important to us to be able to teach the women about how to live a Christian life.

This robust agency-level commitment to maintaining religious content in the program is seen as freedom from government or funder mandates. This approach allows unfettered opportunity for client immersion in the cultural values and attendant program that permeate this type of faith-based organization. Clients in privately funded residential programs receive intensive and prolonged exposure to the religiously infused cultural ethos for which they strive. Mary’s House views this situation not as a curtailment of client choice but an opportunity to model values it wishes to transmit to clients. This commitment to continued privatization remained consistent despite leadership changes within Mary’s House , underscoring how organizational cultures may be preserved even in the wake of director transitions. Consequently, Mary’s House remains profoundly faith-based and overtly Christian, with mandatory attendance at key religious activities offered as part of their program. And, because of changes in United Way ’s funding stipulations as indicated in the quote featured above, Mary’s House does not need to speculate about what might happen if they accepted public funds. They faced this very challenge with United Way and decided to decline the monies offered by this funding source.

The impact of the United Way decision reverberated throughout the program as Mary’s House sought to stay viable financially. The alternative funding it pursued came from local foundations, some of them religious, as well as from individual contributions and church donations . And yet, rather amazingly, even within a constrained funding environment , the effort of Mary’s House to hold true to their vision was accompanied by budget growth, not decline. Still, the current director of Mary’s House is quick to point to the continued vulnerability of this program and the sacrifices they have made to remain viable: “Well, we run on a shoestring. We’re always struggling. We’ve been here fifteen years, so it’s not like we’re going to fold. But it’s a struggle. All our staff are underpaid and we need a new furnace, that kind of thing.”

In contrast to Mary’s House , the scope and manner of faith expression of the remaining transitional housing organizations was viewed as largely unaffected by public funding guidelines. Directors of other organizations readily accepted the funding to support programs seen as vital to the community. Directors at Charity House in 2003 and in 2010 argued that religion was often helpful to people, but were content with and even preferred what might be seen as either its more subtle expression in their agency or as a faith expression in which being non-directive in programming for clients is the best reflection of their faith context. They contended that the expression of their faith is grounded in relationships with residents, principally centered on the staff’s and volunteers ’ attitudes toward residents. Here, acting with compassion is seen as the best expression of their faith. Asked about the religious affiliation of her agency, Charity’s 2010 director offered the following observation.

We see ourselves as non-denominational. We don’t profess any faith because we don’t want to intrude that on anyone. If they want to talk religion, we talk. But we don’t force it on anyone. We make things available for them to read, to search on their own. If they’d like to sit and talk, we do that. I know that there are others that you have to attend certain things, prayer meetings and stuff. We try not to do that and what I find is, you get [guests] to a comfort level where they are more likely to want to talk about certain things … But they know it is not being put on them.

Quite noteworthy in the foregoing statement are comments that speak to the boundaries that Charity House draws with respect to faith. At Charity House , faith is a private matter that should not involve an agency’s intrusion or imposition of specific beliefs and practices on clients. Rather, their approach could be described as religion in reserve. Faith is a language they are willing to speak, but only at the client’s initiative after they have searched on their own and arrived at a personal comfort level with such issues. So, whereas religion is a public obligation at Mary’s House , it is very much an individual option at Charity House . These divergent approaches also run deeply through organizations reflecting different religious denominations.

Directors of the other organizations point to additional documentation that is required of them when receiving public funds, but see few drawbacks with respect to their preferred program approach. The executive director of CASS , Hope House ’s parent agency, saw the use of government funds as unavoidable and perhaps even an obligation given the need in the community: “We felt at the time that it was the only way to go. We are the shadow state. The state can’t do this as efficiently. We do need to find partners and not just rely on government funding one hundred percent. Business and churches should also contribute.”

There was, however, some diversity of views with respect to the influence of public funding on the programs run by these organizations. The director of Charity House saw public funding as having no impact on its transitional housing program. Others, such as the director of Faith House , acknowledged the constraints of public funding with respect to religious expression, but saw no problem with them. In fact, she focused on the benefits brought about through securing public funding, beyond simply having additional revenue available. This director began in a somewhat ambiguous vein. However, the comment soon emphasized the positive qualities that public funding brings to their agency—that is, adherence to sound organizational and fiscal management—as well as, ostensibly, other agencies that receive it.

The only problem is with separation of church and state . They really do not monitor but they make it a condition not to proselytize … We are not in the business of saving souls. It’s not our philosophy or theology. Clients are manipulated enough by others. They don’t need to be manipulated spiritually. One good thing is that government funding requires outcomes . It makes us more organized. It helps you organize and realize how and why you do things. It’s a good thing. Financial management is required.

The director of Hospitality House , a secular agency and the primary local program serving families that included fathers and older sons, discussed the recent history of funding for homeless services. Given the inadequacy of this funding, she offered a larger view on the requirements for assessment attached to public funds, arguing that everyone engaged in the cause should work together to increase funding given that such efforts all help people who are homeless. In her eyes, documenting the significant needs of the homeless population through the assessment and reporting of services provided is critical to arguing for more support of homeless services:

My view is, although sometimes you have to jump through hoops initially that we’re resistant [to], in the end the outcome of the requirements of the government are better for all of us, for the nation. You can’t just talk about yourself. All the data collection that we have to do, whether it is required now by the government agency, gives us credence nationally. [Data] gives us credence with people, with our funders, with politicians, with everything. So although we balked against it initially, that’s what we do. We need to do [it] and we don’t want to change it.

Therefore, publicly funded agencies were quick to call attention to some of the expectations imposed by government funding. However, in general, they did not portray these expectations as overly onerous. Indeed, several emphasized the significant upside of government funding, which included continued organizational viability, the ability to serve more people, and respect for client preferences. Of course, secular program contacts were also not lacking in their criticism of government funding, as indicated through comments shared by Hospitality House ’s first executive director . This director recognized that, in some circumstances, the need to secure funds gets overtaken by reporting complications. She explained that, in general, “We take money wherever we can get it.” And yet, this comment was followed by an important caveat: “We used to accept funds from MHSDA (the state housing authority), but the reporting got too complicated.”

4.4 Evidence of Faith

So, broadly speaking, public funding is perceived as having diverse effects on transitional housing programs. In what ways, then, is faith evident in areas such as programmatic content and structure, manner of religious expression, interagency collaboration, program objectives, and participant experiences?

4.4.1 Programmatic Content and Structure

The content and structure of programs seem to be influenced by faith. This conclusion is supported by the types of housing that are offered, the expectations of program participants, and the manner in which staff interact with program participants. Here again, the key points of distinction are evidenced not only between secular and faith-based providers. They are also evident among the faith-based programs themselves. Similarities and differences emerge in both cases.

The point of entry into programs was the first important similarity evident among all programs. All screened for program participants who seemed likely to be successful in their programs. For example, one faith-based program’s case manager pointed to a requirement that “we want them in school or working. We don’t deviate from that. It shows you’re willing to work.” Hospitality House , which also ran an emergency shelter program, only accepted families coming through their own shelter . In this sense, the shelter is a pipeline for potential residents into the transitional housing program, but also a screening mechanism, one through which selection criteria could be carefully applied. And, Hospitality House , like several faith-based programs, tested for drugs and excluded from further consideration any resident who was currently using drugs. The presence of active mental illness was handled with great caution, particularly when residents shared common spaces in the residence. Interviews were a popular screening tool, while at least one faith-based program’s staff person also stated that she prayed about whom to admit once she had completed the other parts of the application process.

The actual way in which housing was provided varied. All the faith-related programs owned single site housing for their transitional programs.²⁴ Two had residents living together in houses that had been donated to the program, while a third used single-family homes on the blocks by program offices. Hope House ’s program was in a sixteen-unit apartment complex. In an intriguing point of distinction, secular Hospitality House did not own and provide the actual housing, using the model of scattered site housing.²⁵ Their residents were assisted in locating appropriate low-cost housing and provided support services such as assistance locating subsidies and linkage to other needed resources, such as parenting classes, employment, and household furnishings. Owning the property where families lived offered all of the faith-based organizations a measure of control over their residents’ activities and, perhaps more importantly, access to them.

Rules were especially prevalent in shared housing facilities. Hope House prohibited the presence of men after nine o’clock in the evening at its apartment complex. While this rule could be seen as an effort to control residents, it was also intended to provide its female residents with privacy and safety, neither of which most of their residents had experienced just prior to their entry into the program. The women at Charity House lived together in a house owned by the program where they, too, were prohibited from having men in their living quarters. Mary’s House had the most stringent expectations, such as not drinking, forbidding men in the house, and attending Christian services on Sunday morning. At the later interviews , expectations for Mary’s House had become even more stringent, such that Bible studies and weekly devotions at the house had become mandatory. In the past, these activities were simply encouraged as available options.

Rules at programs, then, were aimed at requiring certain program activities and placing some limits on social contact, especially women’s contact with men. Many program participants accepted the imposition of such rules as an inevitable trade-off for the services provided. In fact, if they found the rules objectionable enough, they were not likely to be in the program and would not have been interviewed. Nevertheless, not all residents found the rules acceptable at first blush. One female resident offered a critical comment on her program’s requirement that women be in their residence, with no company, by nine o’clock each night. Yet, she has gradually adjusted to this program requirement.

I was like “Oh, God . I got a curfew?” Company has to be gone at this time? I wasn’t used to it because I hadn’t been through a program like [this] before. [But] throughout the month of being here, I understood why they did it that way. They give you time to think and relax to get yourself back on track. It was kind of hard to adapt. Your family has to be gone at this time and you have to be in at that time. It was hard to be grown with children to adapt to that, but if you have to, you will.

While, in hindsight, some program participants believed the rules were helpful and provided needed structure, others still living in program housing found the rules quite restrictive and chafed at them. Women at one faith-based program were upset by restrictions on their ability to have people in their rooms. Such disagreement emerged in a focus group interview, with one participant stating, “I mean, I understand the men thing,” but another woman quickly following up on this remark by raising the question, “Why can’t our children have their friends in their rooms and play with Barbies or cars or something like that?” Some programs intentionally instituted a series of strict rules to attract the types of clients they desired. The worker at Mary’s House , with its rules against swearing and having sex , along with curfews said, “Some girls aren’t ready for that. They leave the house.” Thus, women who are not already willing to accept some number of religiously focused rules, rules that do not affect their ability to maintain housing, are excluded from the program.

4.4.2 Expressions of Faith

What, then, can be made of the dynamics of faith expression within the programs? Recall that the expression of faith is one of the key axes of faith integration in agencies (see Chap. 2). On this point, faith-based agencies show considerable diversity. There is little overt evidence of faith in the programs that receive public dollars, with faith elements in these programs operating somewhat like an underground stream, periodically visible on the surface but seemingly a constant in the depths of the programs. In this sense, there are periodic glimmers of faith. But, in most of the programs, the difference between being faith-based or secular is that workers in faith-based programs believe that they have permission to consider faith as part of their work, even if only in understanding their work as an expression of their personal faith. So, faith may be evidenced in subtle, yet potentially powerful ways not readily visible to the observer, including the residents themselves. Still, there is wide variation in how the generally muted expression of faith occurs in the individual programs and agencies.

The differences are quite clear between the faith-based agencies that accepted funding and the one that did not. At privately funded faith-intensive Mary’s House , the overt expressions of faith throughout the program are complemented by the Board of Directors holding a spiritual retreat. At CASS , faith expression is more subdued, such that committees open their meetings with a prayer and religious symbols can be found on the waiting room wall. And while Mary’s House holds Bible studies that residents are expected to attend, Charity and Faith Houses have Bibles in office bookcases if residents wish to use them. Charity House ’s model, expressed in such ways as referring to residents as “guests,” is informed by a combination of religious tradition and basic etiquette about showing appropriate hospitality to those who visit one’s home.

Still, if participants are seeking religion, they typically will find it available at the faith-based programs even if it is not overtly expressed there. One faith-based program participant described her ability to access religious offerings through her ongoing interactions with a worker:

We had kind of an issue … so [we said], “We’re going to see what God says.” I know I prayed and she prayed and then she invited me to church. And I was beginning to go to church with her. I was saved. Now it’s my church.

Grettenberger: Did you say that you brought it up with [the worker] or that [she] just invited you to go to church?

I kind of asked, “What church do you go to?” She told me. She asked me, “Do you want to go to church?” I was like, “Yes.”

She and another participant expressed appreciation for the inclusion of religion in the program. The other had not attended worship services for three or four years, yet reported praying with volunteers who came to clean the house, and offered this description: “I like it [praying]. I feel good. I’m going to start going back to church. I want my kids to get into it.”

Participants at another program seemed to feel supported in their faith by the executive director , who had considerable contact with them. As one participant described, “I know when [the director] and I met, she always asked me what I am doing for me. I would tell her everything I have going on. She’s like, ‘Do you do anything just for fun, just for you?’ And I’ll bring up church and the different activities that we have at church. That’s how that’s come up. She would always ask me was I still singing in the choir ‘cause she knows I love that so.”

4.4.3 Collaboration as a Shared Cultural Touchstone

So, how connected were the agencies and programs to each other? The breadth and relative agreement among agencies about what they are trying to accomplish is reflected in their seemingly good relationships. A commitment to interagency collaboration was woven into the fabric of housing services by public funding expectations and by the caring attitude of the staff at these agencies. In this sense, the organizational cultures of these agencies were connected by a common thread, namely, collaboration rather than competition. For example, all the programs accessed the services of another local faith-based agency which met emergency and basic needs, including new home setup such as furniture and other household goods. This faith-based agency, in turn, was a center for the coordination of goods and services donated by congregations and individuals in the community. For many years, this other agency managed a centralized community effort to ensure that all families in need received the makings for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, complete with turkey or ham.

Collaboration was in part an outgrowth of the receipt of federal funds by several programs, as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grants require recipients to coordinate services through a community-level continuum of care model. One purpose of the continuum is to avoid the duplication of services within a given community. However, where homelessness is concerned, such duplication is a remote possibility given the paucity of services in the face of such great need. Indeed, the overwhelming number and needs of the homeless populations in this community touched all these programs. Recognizing how small their programs were in comparison to the large number of families and individuals who were homeless, staff seemed to blend a focus on the people they could help with an almost resigned hope that someone else might manage to pick up the pieces. The desire to help people overshadowed any reluctance staff might otherwise have had to refer people to programs that had a particular amount of faith content or a specific faith orientation.

When asked how they handle referrals, several agency directors and program managers spoke of their waiting lists and of the difficulty associated with telling people who needed services to try one of the other five agencies. Given the volume of calls they were all receiving, the proportionately tiny number they could house, and the fact that the programs typically house people for between ten months and two years, referring clients elsewhere was nearly always an exercise in futility. Several staff described getting ten to fifteen requests for help per day, when all the programs in the network were completely full. Here, faith seemed to be the only way they knew to deal with their own feelings about being able to help so few of the multitudes of people coming to them. The executive director of Charity House offered this thought about how few people her program can help in comparison to the extensive need in her community: “I have to let the rest of them be in His [God ’s] hands (sighing), you know. And that they will be okay until I get to them again. It’s the only thing I can do.”

Amidst this extensive collaboration, there were nevertheless pockets of isolation and some divisions. For instance, one of the faith-based transitional housing programs for families that had been contacted to participate in the initial wave of data collection refused to do so. This relatively large agency offered shelter and meals to chronically homeless people, but is known to require participation in Christian religious activities. Hence, this organization was considerably less connected to counterpart agencies in the area. When staff at the programs that agreed to participate in the study were asked whether there were other programs serving families outside the network to which they belonged, they tentatively identified this more sectarian Christian program. None seemed quite certain of the nature of its services, and all indicated that there was not collaboration between their programs and this more isolated sectarian program. Efforts by the Michigan researcher (Grettenberger) to invite participation from this sectarian agency elicited responses that seemed protective of the organization, perhaps indicating distrust of a researcher inquiring into the programming of faith-based organizations. The lack of collaboration with the other programs seemed to suggest an organization whose values led it to be quite closed to outside influences. Thus, organizational cultures can, in some circumstances, promote isolation rather than inclusion. Several program staff expressed regrets that they had been unable to connect with this other organization even though they had made efforts to do so. The inaccessibility of the missing faith-based organization suggests deeper differences between the programs or agencies with the most faith content. But, of course, without direct access to such an organization, any conclusions on this front are speculative.

The desire for greater collaboration with this sectarian agency had a more pragmatic purpose for Hospitality House ’s director. She pointed to the impact of faith-based agencies separating themselves from collaboration to document the need for funding and resources for homeless programs in communities.

I talked to one agency in town that is completely faith-based , and it is not going to tend to take government funding. But then you still need [service delivery] numbers. So far, we’ve had fairly good luck with getting [those from them]. Well, they won’t put [data] in but they’ll let somebody come in and do it. So we get it [here while] some counties can’t get the faith-based [programs] to participate.

4.4.4 Similar Objectives

The transitional housing programs featured here share a strong core purpose, specifically, to ensure that their families secure and keep permanent housing upon completing the program. While this end-goal may seem intuitively obvious, it defies assumptions of some outside observers who charge that faith-based organizations are simply using their programs as vehicles for the dissemination of religious messages. The agencies and programs in this study do not fit this critique. Numerous life skills that commonly function as barriers to client success are taught as part of the programs. Throughout the interviews , there emerged a theme of meeting people where they are and working with them holistically. All the programs shared an understanding that people’s lives are complicated, with homelessness serving as one of many problems, one that may be either a cause or symptom of other problems their families are experiencing. All the programs sought to improve the quality of people’s lives in concrete ways. They all recognized a need for people’s attitudes and behaviors to change if their difficult life circumstance and problems of their families were to improve.

In the initial wave of data collection, program staff from all five programs, secular and faith-based , articulated their desire to help resident families improve as many dimensions of their lives as possible. Responding to open-ended questions about what they envision as success for the participants, the responses expressed an overall hope that people’s lives, especially those of children, would be markedly improved by completing the program. Without exception, acquiring and maintaining stable housing was viewed as the most desirable outcome. Beyond this widely held goal, and reflecting their holistic approach, all the programs envisioned other related outcomes as well, including stable employment, financial circumstances, educational advancement for adults and school success for children. The director at Charity House pointed to the link between employment and having an education , giving the following example of an interaction with a client with young children:

She was struggling, going to these little jobs cleaning houses. Her oldest was going to start school this year. I said, “This is an opportunity. There’s grant money out there. Get you some grant money. Get an education while they’re little and you’ll have the day care. Go get your education .” [So she started school] and I thought, oh, how neat! She will be better able to provide for these children when they are bigger. And [she won’t have] this drudgery [of] scrubbing floors.

While the development of concrete skills was a uniform objective, staff recognized the importance of less tangible outcomes that do not lend themselves to measuring or monitoring. Improving quality of life, self-sufficiency , and emotional well-being were identified by staff across the full range of agencies. One such outcome was shared by three programs, Hope House , Charity House , and Mary’s House , that served only women and their children. These faith-based programs, while divergent in the extent and manner of faith expression, shared a desire for women to become more empowered in their relationships with men. The first executive director at Mary’s House , in a clear reflection of their religious values , expressed a hope that her program’s women would someday marry. At the same time, she also wanted them to “learn they don’t need to have a man in the house to feel good about themselves.” Speaking to the relationships between the women Mary’s House serves and their men, the director invoked language of her faith to express a broader notion, identifying one goal for the women as being for them to recognize they “have authority in all areas of [their] lives.”

The executive director of Charity House in 2010 echoed earlier comments for her agency. She suggested it was necessary to “encourage them to have self-love and not have to be dependent on trying to get that love from an outside source that may not assist them in the care of themselves or their children. That, I think, has been one of the harder elements [because] they look for love in all the wrong places.”

4.5 Parsing Out the Differences

Also of considerable interest is identifying differences in the goals and objectives between faith-based and secular organizations, or among faith-based organizations themselves. Here, however, there are surprisingly few areas on which faith-based and secular organizations diverged. The most important difference seemed to involve what the staff wanted residents to experience through their program. While both secular and faith-based programs sought to create a caring environment for clients they served, it seemed particularly important to the staff of the faith-based programs that their participants learn that they are loved in addition to changing behavior and making lifestyle changes. These twin motives were mingled in the faith-based programs.

Many faith-based program staff spoke of faith as a guiding motivation, with the variety of traditions leading to different expressions of that faith in interactions with residents and the programs’ tone. Yet, offering love and hope was essential for all of them. One of Charity House ’s directors expressed her commitment to showing compassion for and acceptance of the program’s guests in her comments, reflective of a Christian servant theology:

We come from a Christian foundation of Christ telling us to feed the poor and take care of them. And that’s where our whole basis is, that everything we do, we do in the name of God … We see it as our responsibility … We are supposed to do that. We’re supposed to take care of those that seem less fortunate, or if they aren’t less fortunate, perhaps they just made poor decisions … I think it’s just the love of humankind.

Her comments were a continuation of the earlier director’s philosophy about offering “love and caring for people that need caring and that are hurting. It’s what we are called to do by our faith. We have to do this.”

Charity House ’s social worker in 2010 did not reference faith elements initially. Instead, he spoke of the differences between how the executive director , a seasoned African American female social worker, might affect residents differently than he as a thirty-eight year-old black man might. Yet, when asked directly about the role of religion in the program, he seemed initially puzzled by the question. After some consideration, he then quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: “‘Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me.’ We have to show them Christian love but we don’t push our belief on them.” His executive director also sees their work in a faith context, but in a way that informs her expectations of her own behavior, not her expectations of the residents: “My thing is that I pray. I pray that God will send me the best person who wants me to help them. Send me who you think needs help right now.”

Staff in all four programs expressed a desire for their residents to experience greater hope and a palpable sense of safety, both of which they see as fostering change. The program director at Hope House explained that “a focus of the program is to help women change their priorities, to move from being in crisis with the wolf at the door, or being ‘in love,’ asking ‘what’s in it for me’ to healthier behaviors. [We] try to offer hope because they can’t be future oriented without hope.”

The first executive director of Mary’s House was a pastor’s wife with professional social service experience who described the approach at Mary’s House with personal conviction and religious language. She linked these intangibles with the possibility of more tangible change:

I think people can change on their own. But it’s easier when you have hope and believe that God loves you. When people get ahold of “God loves me and I want to please Him,” some can make great changes on their own. We give them hope. They can set goals for the future. Self-esteem has increased. Their ability to parent is improved. They’ve seen Christianity worked out. They experience the love of Christ through us. They deserve love no matter what they’ve done or how they act.

A more nuanced picture emerges for staff in the remaining faith-based programs. In these other three programs, faith expression among the program staff sometimes seems more important than the participants’ faith. In these circumstances, staff balanced their own professional values with openness to the inclusion of spirituality for residents. Comments from a worker at Hope House illustrate this balance: “We ask about her spiritual beliefs. We encourage them … [to see that] belonging to the church [can be] a support system and a positive environment for their kids.” Yet, here again, rather robust personal faith convictions were tempered with respect for individuality and different life circumstances that are common parlance in the field of social work . The Hope House worker continues:

It’s an individual thing. I do expect a change. Beauty, if even the most depressed people wake up to beauty, they feel better. For example, being able to understand the necessity of work, developing self into whatever they want to do or be. Planting possibilities is important. Pick something positive, such as an interest in braiding, maybe even a salon … I try to talk about what I see as their best. I don’t want to control [a resident’s] life. It’s a fine line. People are willing to let others take control. I need to empower them as much as possible.

The threads of faith, of seeking to provide a compassionate oasis, were also found at Hope House . In spite of heading CASS , Hope’s parent agency which served 7,000 clients through fifteen different programs, the executive director seemed quite closely in touch with the hands-on details of the housing program. She emphasized the tangible aspects of Hope House ’s approach, characterizing its goal as “to help women who are homeless to become able to live in permanent affordable housing.” She then noted, “The way we get to that is more exciting and vibrant.” She clearly saw the importance of how the services are provided, hinting at a set of values later expressed by the staff. She offered that “a woman needs to change her attitude regarding her priorities to have sustainability ” of her behavioral change.

In contrast to the (sometimes subtle) idioms of faith articulated by faith-based agency workers, the staff at secular Hospitality House were more interested in building skills designed to lead to independence and permanent housing. There was seemingly less focus on the relationship as the basis for change. Instead, Hospitality adopted a pragmatic approach as reflected in the executive director ’s comments: “Our goal is for people to be as stable and successful and independent as possible.” Hospitality House staff consistently pointed to behavioral change as the primary program goal, with little mention of how participants might experience their time in the program or their interactions with workers. Perhaps reflecting a professional intervention model oriented to measureable outcomes and certainly reflecting a different theory of change, its first executive director described this approach:

It is easier to change their behavior and hope that then their attitude changes. We focus on self-esteem building and encouragement. We work on finding ways to praise them for their successes. We give them the chance to contact us if they have questions or problems, but balance that with the need for them to do it on their own. We also work on having goals in writing and giving the feedback [about their progress].

Hospitality’s case worker at the second data collection wave saw her role as helping her clients learn basic skills.

Maybe not so much [changes in] attitude as lifestyle. A lot of them, they know what they want. They are excited about what they want. But it’s a matter of changing their actual lifestyle to accomplish that. When I spend all this money here, it takes away from my housing budget … It’s more a matter of [the person] just making that decision, [of learning skills such as] budgeting, money management, time management. It’s equipping them with the tools they need. That might be going over a budget fifty million times. It’s a lot of repetition.

It seems clear that all the programs, secular and faith-based , seek to improve the lives of participant families. The faith-based programs have an additional interest, that of offering programs which are strongly reflective of the religious values they hold, particularly the value of caring as an expression of faith . Thus, these faith-based programs are explicitly concerned with how their programs offer services, seeking to help people feel valued through an atmosphere of deep caring and even love, while the secular program’s focus is on client outcomes directly related to self-sufficiency and stability, supported by caring.

In one final difference between the various programs, Mary’s House —the sole privately funded program—diverged from the other faith-based programs as the only program with explicitly religious client outcomes , with staff at both data collection points identifying such objectives. Along with finishing high school and holding a job, the staff person whose job title is “house mother” pointed to one resident as a success for continuing to attend church and getting married. More recently, her successor expressed her delight that one resident “just accepted the Lord two weeks ago.” According to the director of Mary’s House , women have been affected by the program in that “they develop knowledge of God that they just can’t forget about Him.” Not surprisingly given the constraints of funding and their different faith traditions, these overtly religious hopes for participants were not expressed in the other programs that received public funds.

*****

The transitional housing programs featured in this chapter form a cooperative network of agencies whose common interest is to improve and stabilize the lives of people, particularly families, who are homeless. Faith-based programs of various sorts are active participants in this network. Faith-related programs —those with more modest degrees of religious expression—engage in various strategies to temper the dosage of religion that they provide. In these programs, faith acts as an undercurrent and is available in a manner that can be calibrated to match client preferences. In such programs, Bibles are available on bookshelves, but there are no mandatory Bible studies.

The opposite ends of this continuum are anchored, respectively, by faith-intensive Mary’s House and secular Hospitality House . At Mary’s House , the strict rules about religious observance, social visits, curfews, and other facets of life would likely merit considerable scrutiny if public funding was pursued. Consequently, Mary’s House intentionally chooses not to bid for public monies. Leaders at Mary’s House willingly accept its more limited revenue stream of private donations to run programs as they see fit. At Mary’s House , the financial value of public funds is of diminished importance compared to the cultural value of private donations . In this sense, programmatic content is driven by the values at the center of a privately funded organization’s culture. The private funding stream permits faith to permeate nearly every facet of programming mandates at this agency. Relying solely on private donations leaves Mary’s House free to require client participation in religious activities.

On the other end of the spectrum is secular Hospitality House . This agency readily accepts government funding and is pleased to use such funds to serve a wider swath of the city’s homeless population than it could address without such resources. It is willing to adhere to the additional strictures of public funding to maintain and even enhance the viability of their service offerings. Program impact at Mary’s House and Hospitality House is thus conceived of in quite different terms. Both agencies aim to cultivate high-quality relationships with clients, though the elements that constitute high-quality relationships are decidedly different.

The cases presented here lend further credibility to the argument that social service organizations often purposefully choose their funding stream to match their organizational culture and programmatic content . In this sense, funding is not really transformative. Rather, it simply reinforces preexisting organizational orientations. So, rather than finding overt mechanisms of exclusion in the solicitation of grant applications or the awarding of funds (highly religious agencies need not apply), we observed a process of self-selection (highly religious agencies choose not to apply). While we need to be careful not to draw sweeping generalizations from a handful of cases presented in this chapter and the one before it, there does seem to be an elective affinity between the degree of faith in an organization and the prospective funding avenues the agency is willing to consider. To what degree will this pattern hold as we turn our attention away from transitional housing and instead examine addiction recovery programs? With this question in mind, we now turn to our final case study .