Houston has drawn national attention for its success over the past decade with what’s known as a 'housing-first' approach. Now Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia, from Precinct 2, has spearheaded what he calls an employment-first model.
Christina Johnson, 33, holds a ladder for his teammate Doug Cope, right, 62, as he climbs it to put a fresh coat of paint on a facility at the Jim and JoAnn Fonteno Family Park, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2022, in Houston. Johnson and Cope work through the Harris County's Employ2Empower program in collaboration with Career and Recovery Resources.
The program's unique incentive of hourly wages gets people in need of housing to interact regularly with support staff, making it easier to connect them with resources and follow up about housing applications. It also eases them back into the workforce and teaches them specialized skills in a forgiving setting – workers are not given drug tests or penalized for missing days.
“We could see the connection between employment and housing,” said Nkechi Agwuenu, the organization’s chief operational officer. “If you don’t have an address, you don’t have a bank account, you don’t have an ID, you have a criminal history – that makes it impossible to work.” While nearly all of the participants in Employ2Empower’s work crews have filled out a housing application at some point, only about 63 percent were actively on a wait list at the they joined the program, according to Agwuenu. That’s because so many had lost their spots when their housing navigators could not contact them. But Employ2Empower workers see their case managers every day they show up for the job.On a recent Wednesday morning, Madu woke up at 6:30 a.m.
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