Permanent Affordable Housing is housing where someone can live indefinitely until they are ready to move. The cost of rent does not exceed 30% of the tenants’ income, so their rent remains affordable regardless of changes in their ability to secure resources. We support our clients on their journey of finding and maintaining permanent affordable housing by providing a variety of resources and support. We help our clients identify their housing goals and coach them towards them. We provide temporary shelter, help people get into shelters, and help people maintain their permanent affordable housing.

Legal and Financial support is important because the households we serve often don’t have the resources required to adequately resolve issues like custody, debt, and criminal record issues. We aim to help our clients resolve these issues, increase financial literacy, become financially stable, and address any past or present legal issues. Unresolved legal and financial problems create barriers to finding and keeping shelter and employment. Most people at risk for chronic homelessness cannot afford access to high quality legal counsel or financial experts. With our support, our clients are able to access these services, resolve issues they may have struggled with for years, and live a life with significantly less mental and economic burdens.

Essential Needs include safety, heat, food, clothing, household items, mental health treatments, and medical care. We assist our clients in connecting with these things and provide them when necessary. Consistent access to an adequate amount of essential needs is important, not only to the safety and wellness of a family, but inherently important to functioning in, and contributing to our society. Without having their essential needs met, families are operating at a deficit. There are physical and emotional consequences to vulnerable families and society in general when people go without adequate heat, food, and medical care, including diminished executive function.

Advocacy and Accountability are built into the fabric of all of the areas of support, but so important and vital that they warrant their own area of support to evaluate. Advocacy addresses the systematic dysfunction that is holding people back from changing their lives. Without our advocacy, our clients “fall through the cracks” and don’t receive resources or services that they qualify for. Accountability addresses the internal dysfunction that holds our clients back from reaching their goals. The gentle accountability provided by Jubilee gives our clients a safe space to reflect. In the context of healthy relationships with mentors that are invested in their success, our clients can confront personal issues that are holding them back as well as celebrate victories.

Mentoring relationships are integral to our program. Most incidences of homelessness can be directly tied to a breakdown in relationships or lack of support. Our mentoring relationships provide clients with an opportunity to experience a healthy relationship and learn relationship skills, thereby decreasing the likelihood of an additional episode of homelessness. Each household Jubilee serves is connected with a mentor that consistently evaluates which supports are most appropriate to focus on. Our mentors help clients set achievable goals, identify the support required to reach those goals, connect to support, and act as a cheerleader along the way. We also utilize mentoring relationships in other aspects of our program. For instance, if someone is interested in starting a business, we will connect them with a business mentor

Connection to community is the area of support where we address the fact that most people at risk for chronic homelessness typically function in social environments that perpetuate a poverty mindset and provide little chance of escaping the cycle. As humans, the people we let influence us profoundly impact our personalities, perspectives, ways of thinking, and behaviors. By simply connecting our clients with positive relationships in the community that aren’t otherwise accessible to them, we give our clients a real opportunity to escape poverty and never be homeless again. We implement a variety of strategies to get and keep our clients connected to positive and transformational community, and help them overcome obstacles like transportation, and incentivize participation in community activities.

Educational, Vocational, and Entrepreneurial support addresses goals that are critical to obtaining the resources required to get through life, as well as provide purpose and satisfaction. Jubilee mentors help our clients identify their educational, career, or business goals. We ask questions like, “Who do you need to know in order to make progress with this goal? What are things you can do today and this week to make progress toward this goal? When our clients encounter roadblocks, we remove the roadblocks or help them identify alternate routes. We believe that accomplishing their own goals brings ultimate satisfaction and best outcomes, so we do not set goals for them, rather support them as they work toward their own goals. We don’t discourage goals that may feel unrealistic. If our clients decide to redefine their goals, we support them through that. We assist clients with resume building services, tutoring, entrepreneurial support, and more.