Little Rock explores program giving jobs to homeless people

Little Rock is exploring a program that would pull the homeless off the streets and give them city jobs for a couple of days every week, city officials told homelessness advocates Wednesday.

There’s A Better Way, a program already implemented in Albuquerque, N.M., pays the homeless city dollars to do jobs like picking up trash or cleaning up at the zoo. Officials from Albuquerque are coming in September to explain details of their program to homeless advocates in Little Rock, said B.J. Wyrick, Little Rock city director for Ward 7.

Wyrick and Vice Mayor Kathy Webb, who is also the city director for Ward 3, presented the idea to members of the Arkansas Homeless Coalition on Wednesday. The coalition is a group of more than 50 homelessness service providers and advocates who meet monthly.

“I see this as a community adventure to see how it’s working in Albuquerque, how it’s working in other cities,” Wyrick said. “I see this as another tool in our box to help with homelessness.”

The 2017 census of the homeless population in central Arkansas showed there were 990 people living in shelters or outside in Lonoke, Prairie, Pulaski and Saline counties.

The Albuquerque program began in 2015 with a $50,000 budget and paid participants $9 an hour. After a day of work, the homeless were taken back to a center that provides housing, therapy and other support services so they could be connected with help.

Most of the initial money for the program came from donations, and the budget was increased to $181,000 in 2017, according to the city website. Several other cities including Ocean Springs, Miss., Austin, Texas, and Chicago launched similar programs.

“We are still in the infancy stages,” Webb said of the program.

She said she has put in a request with the Clinton School of Public Service to research the cities that have done the project to find out which ones have had the most success and what Little Rock can address.

Webb said the program would achieve city goals established when Little Rock joined the International Compassionate City initiative in August. Communities that join the push set goals to address issues such as poverty, homelessness or under-served children. They then partner with nonprofits and raise funds to achieve those goals.

“It’s an aspirational goal, and if you don’t have aspirational goals, you’re really leaving a lot on the table,” Webb said.

The Albuquerque official who comes to Little Rock will speak at the Clinton School and meet with advocates in a smaller group, Webb said.

She added there have not been talks of where the funds will come from and that no existing city jobs would be displaced by the program, although the homeless would do some of the jobs typically tackled by city employees.

“As you can tell from our streets, we’re not able to tackle every location,” she said.

Programs in other cities have paid the homeless between $9 and $13.50 an hour or have given them a daily sum with a cap of $600 per year to avoid making participants file a 1099 form with the Internal Revenue Service, Wyrick said.