A local nonprofit is seeking public support in reaching its capital campaign goal to help maintain safe, affordable housing in the Quad Cities over the next five years.
Humility Homes and Services in Davenport aims to raise $2.9 million to cover housing improvements and program support. So far, the organization has raised over $2.73 million in private funding.
CEO Ashley Velez Hagler said the organization has been working with donors and funders over the last two years on the capital campaign to cover unit maintenance costs and its various support services. She said there is a lack of grants to cover maintenance costs, creating a funding problem for the non-profit.
“And so that is ensuring that we follow a housing first approach, which means that everybody's worthy of housing, there's no wrong door to housing, and all of our rents are 20 to 30% under fair market rate,” Velez Hagler said in an interview with WVIK. “[Department of Housing and Urban Development] says they set a rate every year, saying this is what is based on your housing market, based off of your inflation wages, that sort of thing. They say this is what rent should be in your community. Well, that is still high for people who are living on Social Security or who are making minimum wage or if they have young kids, they can only work part-time because we know we have a lack of childcare in our community.’
“So we did this campaign in order to help keep our rents below the market rate because if not, we would have had to take in the money for rental income and invest it back into them, which means we would have to raise our rents and potentially not be cost-affordable anymore for the population that we serve. And that isn't our mission.”
She said there are federal grant opportunities, but that the nonprofit needed to show comprehensive data and initial investors to successfully lobby for federal dollars, which is what the Community Is Us capital campaign is doing.
The bulk of the funding will go toward renovating the 152 units of housing, including ADA-accessible units, paths, and doors. However, the dollars will also assist what Velez Hagler calls stability funding.
‘[W]hich is really funding for…sometimes people may just need a car repair, and then they can go to work. Right. And they can maintain their housing. So it's money that we can use to say, ‘[O]kay, here's like a gap filler, a stop filler to keep you housed or to quickly rehouse you.’ So there's some in there as well. Really, the biggest takeaway is that it was done in a very strategic manner to identify gaps in our agency's system and in the community that support people who are unhoused or living in unstable housing. And so being the largest housing, standalone housing provider in the Quad Cities, we wanted to ensure that we are still maintaining, and we're still leading the way and filling in the gaps for those who need us the most.”
Humility Homes and Services Board Member and co-chair of the capital campaign, Kelly McCarthy, said the current funding by private donors has allowed the organization to renovate bathrooms and kitchens in some of its properties.
“We've already been able to utilize some of the funds to make some improvements throughout the housing and shelter. In the shelter, specifically, we were able to renovate the laundry facility with commercial-grade equipment, which allows our staff and residents to have easier access to those services,” McCarthy said in an interview with WVIK. “Of being able to do the laundry, as you can imagine, the shelter, there's quite a bit of bedding and sheets and clothing that needs to be taken care of. So we were able to use some of the funds to do that.”
The capital campaign lead donor gifts include the Ryan Foundation, Hubble Waterman, the Congregation of the Humility of Mary, Ascentra Credit Union, Green State Credit Union, Community Resources Corporation, and some private donors.
President and CEO of Ascentra Credit Union, Linda Andry, said the nonprofit approached the credit union in 2023 about the capital campaign, and the credit union and its foundation split $90,000 over three years to support the mission.
“[W]e do know that in our communities here, affordable housing and stable housing are issues,” Andry said in an interview with WVIK. “There's not enough of it. And the work that Humility Homes is doing to ensure that people have safe transitional housing, safe permanent housing, working with homelessness, and trying to get folks off the street in an emergency situation, they're doing great work in all of those areas on both sides of the river. And Ascentra, as a community partner and a member of these communities, we just wanted to give some of our financial resources to also help the good work that Humility Homes is doing to ensure that the housing units there are enough housing units, which is a long way off, I'm sure. But at least to improve the number of housing units, advance the number of housing units so that they can help more people, because the number of people who are unhoused or need safe housing just keeps growing.”
Those interested in learning more about the capital campaign can visit the nonprofit’s website.
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