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When Brenda Johnson began working with the homeless,
she didn’t know that creativity was part of the job description. But after two years as executive director of
Springfield’s Helping Hands homeless shelter, she learned quickly
that funding increases don’t exactly follow utility, minimum-wage, or
cost-of-living increases. “It’s a problem,” Johnson says.
“When you run into funding strings for emergency shelters, there has
been no growth — if anything, there has been a decrease.”
Because federal grants only go so far in supporting
her organization’s services and give no funds to the shelter itself,
Johnson is always seeking out new resources. When Ward 5 Ald. Sam Cahnman
approached her with a new fundraising idea during his February campaign,
she says, she found what Helping Hands was looking for. Cahnman’s idea to round up City Water, Light
& Power bills to the next dollar as a means of generating funds for
Springfield’s homeless was approved by the City Council on Tuesday in
an effort to provide a simple way for city residents to help solve the
problem. Johnson says the area’s agencies that serve the
homeless are behind the ordinance, because they believe it will reach the
masses without requiring any of them to devote time to costly capital
campaigns or individual fundraisers. “We have to be creative in our efforts to find
funding for situations like the homeless,” Johnson says. “This
is as creative as it gets.”
Cahnman’s ordinance will give CWLP customers
the option twice yearly to enroll in the round-up program. He says that if
only a third of the 69,000 customers were to participate and donate roughly
50 cents monthly, nearly $138,000 would be directed into a special fund at
the end of the year that would then be distributed to initiatives across
the city. “This is just loose change,” Cahnman
says. “To most people, it would represent very little sacrifice, and
in addition it will help to balance checkbooks at the end of the month so
people don’t have to fool around with pennies.”
Cahnman already has a few ideas of what could be done
with the donations, such as working to fund a day shelter like the Oasis in
Decatur that offers lockers, telephones, and laundry and shower facilities
to the homeless or to fund new preventive or mental-health programs. But first, Cahnman says, the city needs to ensure
that its emergency shelters have enough bed space for its homeless
population — estimated to be around 300 on the basis of a count done
by the Heartland Continuum for Care last January. Even though the city
recently opened its expanded Springfield Overflow Shelter, Cahnman says
that more needs to be done. Mayor Tim Davlin recently said that Cahnman’s
ordinance would not be successful in raising enough funds to make a
difference, but Ernie Slottag, the city’s communications director,
says the mayor will support any method that works. “It’s the mayor’s feeling that
people should donate directly to agencies that could help the
homeless,” says Ernie Slottag, city communication’s director,
“but he doesn’t have a problem with this method of getting
assistance for them, either.”
Cahnman says he based his ordinance on other round-up
programs across the country, such as one started by South Carolina’s
Lynches River Electric Cooperative in which 90 percent of 20,000 customers
generate more
than $100,000 yearly for organizations that serve the homeless. “Right now, we’ve got nothing,” he
says, “so even if we raise $50,000 that’s $50,000 more than we
had before.”
Contact Amanda Robert at arobert@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2007.
