New anti-poverty plan encourages Pittsburgh agencies to work together

Actor-Bill-Nunn-at-Pittsburgh-Community-Services
Date Published: 
Monday, January 12, 2015

Actor Bill Nunn, left, stopped by the Pittsburgh Community Services Inc. Christmas party at the Hill House Association and signed autographs. Bill Wade/Post-Gazette.

In a new plan to reduce poverty in the city, Pittsburgh Community Services Inc. has proposed a widespread system of resource and information sharing to help the poor reach self-sufficiency.

The Pittsburgh Path to Prosperity would begin with interactive websites for case managers, nonprofits and the public. It would then organize social service agencies, businesses, academia, government, foundations and neighborhood groups into cross-referencing networks. The agency's Micro Business Institute also has been restructured to train budding entrepreneurs.

The agency used a $90,000 community services block grant to pay for the plan. With an additional $50,000, Community Services can provide software, training, a server and manager to launch the sites, said Cynthia Gormley, the agency's project manager.

It is now seeking that funding.

The sites would serve as bulletin boards to post needs such as a two-bedroom apartment near a transit stop, a referral to job training or a food pantry. Case managers now spend frustrating hours on the phone seeking help for clients, Ms. Gormley said.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines poverty as an income of $23,850 or less for a family of four, $15,730 for two.

The region has about 3,200 social service agencies that occasionally network but rarely share data or information, Ms. Gormley said. "People come up with great ideas without realizing the same thing is being done several blocks away."

Pittsburgh Community Services was established in 1983 as the city's designated anti-poverty agency. Like many nonprofits, it offers job training, a food pantry and programs for the elderly. It also runs the Environment and Energy Community Outreach (EECO) Center in Larimer, providing workshops, meeting space and utility assistance.

Ms. Gormley wrote the new plan from a year of research and surveys. City officials, social service workers and community advocates helped target 14 neighborhoods of need: the Hill District, South Oakland, Hazelwood, Homewood, Larimer, Brighton Heights, California Kirkbride, Spring Hill, Spring Garden, Sheraden, Crafton Heights, Elliott, Beltzhoover and Lawrenceville.

Despite its hot real estate market, Lawrenceville has a 28 percent poverty rate, said Lauren Byrne, executive director of Lawrenceville United. The rate is 38.7 percent in Lower Lawrenceville, where 25 percent of the population are single older women, she said.

Lawrenceville is still eligible for income-based community development block grants, while Beltzhoover, the only southern neighborhood in the target group, was chosen in part because it no longer is. In a reconfiguration of census tracts, it was grouped with the more prosperous Bon Air and part of Brookline.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development uses a formula to determine block grant eligibility and amounts based in part on the extent of poverty, age and density of housing and population growth comparisons.

Hugh Brannan, executive director of the Brashear Association, which serves the city's southern neighborhoods, said that when the steel mills closed in the 1980s, people had "a sense things would get better. There was a stronger safety net and extended unemployment benefits.

"Today, we see a husband and wife making $8, $9 an hour, wages that have remained stagnant" while costs of food and housing increase, "with traditional pensions a thing of the past," he said. "There's not the same sense things are going to get better."

Of the Path to Prosperity plan, he said, "We're strong advocates of sharing information. Resources are limited and any effort to use them more effectively makes sense."

Before working at Pittsburgh Community Services last year, Ms. Gormley was a human resource specialist for the state Department of Community and Economic Development. A former Marine, she also spent 19 years as a caseworker for the Department of Public Welfare.

A living wage of $16.98 an hour equals $35,000 a year, which is what a family of four needs to get by in Pittsburgh, she said. Income from two minimum wage jobs falls $6,000 short of that. In some households, two people may be working at three low-paying jobs, making too much to get, say, child care support, but too little to afford child care.

Some who don't work are less at risk of losing subsidies, so if the whole point is to get people out of poverty, she said, creative arrangements such as flexible hours, a benefits loan bank and bartering could be incentives and pathways.

"The working poor need case management, support and resources," she said. "Self-sufficiency is our goal, and for that people need stepping stones. A letter that says you can only make so much or lose your food stamps should read, 'Here's how we can help you become self-sufficient.' "

Source: Diana Nelson Jones / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-azette.com/local/city/2015/01/12/New-anti-poverty-plan-e...