United Way recently announced $300,000 worth of special grants in the area of rapid re-entry housing.  I’m not sure

Andrea Ferstan, Community Impact Manager

exactly how that works, so I decided to get the skinny from one of our in-house experts, Andrea Ferstan, Community Impact Manager for Basic Needs.

Andrea: Rapid Re-housing is an innovative and cost-effective approach to secure stable housing for homeless families. Re-housing programs work with people who are recently homeless to help them quickly move into rental housing.

 Rapid Re-housing includes:

• Comprehensive screening of families to ensure success
• Support to locate and maintain affordable rental housing
• Short-term rental subsidies while the family transitions
• Connections to needed resources for families addressing multiple challenges such as health care or child care

 Is this something new in the Twin Cities?

 Andrea: Rapid Re-housing builds on the success of Rapid Exit, a proven best practice that started in Hennepin County. The Rapid Exit model includes:

1. Central screening of all families within three days of shelter admission to determine housing barriers.
2. Barrier rating (level of difficulty in getting and keeping housing).
3. Referral to a Rapid Exit nonprofit for immediate re-housing in the private housing market.

The Rapid Exit direct service staff have successfully been re-housing families with little to no (rental) subsidy until recently, when higher rents and a weakening job market have made this more difficult. In Hennepin County, 72% of families entering the shelter are aided through the Rapid Exit program and 95% of those families remain housed 12 months later. Savings to Hennepin County has been in the millions of dollars.

Rapid Re-entry builds on this model, adding temporary rental subsidies to help families get settled and back on their feet.

Given current economic realities and the scope of the recession, $300,000 doesn’t seem like a lot of money. How many people do you think United Way can help with $300,000?

Andrea: Greater Twin Cities United Way’s investment of $300,000, leveraged with other resources, will result in 414 families moving out of the shelter and into permanent housing. Greater Twin Cities United Way is hosting a Rapid-Re-housing event tomorrow (6/26/09). Learn more.

I was reading an article in Ode the other day, about economics and altruism.

The article’s basic tenet is that current economic theory is premised on the belief that people will generally work toward their own material advantage. But, they point out, recent research in behavioral economics finds that people are much more altruistic than standard economics gives them credit for.

Here’s the part I found most interesting: Sometime in the 1990s, Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist, conducted research to test the hypothesis: “Exposure to the self-interest model commonly used in economics alters the extent to which people behave in self-interested ways.” A less neutral reading of that might be: People who believe that selfish behavior is the norm behave more selfishly.

 And here’s what he found:

[E]conomics professors gave less to charity than their university colleagues; and when asked to imagine they’d found somebody else’s $100 bill, economics students were three times more likely to say they’d keep the money than students from the astronomy department.

The implication is that being steeped in economic theory, thinking everyone is out for their own gain, causes one to be more selfish, less altruistic. Now, I don’t know if that’s true, but the idea of expectations and outcomes is interesting. According to the author, negativity begets negativity. I have no quarrel with that—I can think of any number of times where someone’s rudeness has soured my day. 

That leads in some interesting directions. What would an altruistic-based economics look like? That’s worth thinking about, isn’t it?

It also got me thinking about education, and how the same thing holds true there: Expectations play a huge role in educational attainment. Teacher expectations, parent expectations, even peer expectations.  

I have never really thought about how my expectations affect my everyday life. Or how they affect people around me. I am going to pay attention to this for the next few weeks, and will report back to you. Suggestions for experiments (that won’t get me fired) are welcome.

June. Is there a better time to be alive in Minnesota? It’s a great time for just about anything, including starting a blog.

What I hope to do with this blog:

• Present interesting information that is current and relevant to our region (the Greater Twin Cities United Way region includes the usual seven-county metro area plus Chisago and Isanti counties).
• Dispel some myths-mostly around people and statistics.
• Help you learn about Greater Twin Cities United Way-what we do and why.
• Have fun!

Mostly I’ll deal with serious issues, but everyone needs a mental health break now and then, so I’ll include the occasional leavening under the guise of “Work-Life Balance.”

Data note: I’m sure most of you saw that the new national unemployment stats are out-the unemployment rate is now 9.4%, up from 8.9% in April. But that’s only the official unemployment rate. If you don’t read past the first few paragraphs, you miss the finer detail:

The unemployment rate counts only individuals who are actively looking for work-that’s about 14.5 million people. If you add in the 9.1 million people who are working part-time because their hours have been reduced or that’s all they can get (usually referred to as involuntary part-time workers), and the 2.2 million discouraged workers (who want to work and are available for work but aren’t counted as unemployed because they haven’t actively looked for work in the last four weeks), the unemployment rate stands at 16.4%. This is sometimes referred to as the real unemployment rate.

I found this really cool graphic at the Wall Street Journal, that puts our current recession and unemployment figures in historical context. Note that in the first half of 1983, when unemployment rates were above 10%, the recession was officially over. What I glean from this is that even after the recession officially ends, the unemployment rate will likely continue to stay high for at least six months.

I can’t end on such a bleak note. So….

Final Comment: Last night I was reading Jim Gilbert’s Minnesota Nature Notes for the first week of June, and I learned that turtles are out and away from their water in this first part of the month, seeking higher nesting grounds. Keep an eye out-they cross a lot of roads.