UMOM child care lends hand to help parents out of homelessness
On a chilly fall morning, Darlene Newsom greeted mothers and fathers dropping their children off at the child-care center at United Methodist Outreach Ministries. Some children didn’t want to leave their mothers. Some seemed eager to play. One, upon request, gave Newsom a high-five.
The children would spend their day at the compound of classrooms and playgrounds near the rear of the shelter, filling time with play and art and reading.
Alma Gonzales, a 34-year-old mother of five, had dropped her two youngest off at the center. Her other three children were at school, having left on the bus that stops at the shelter. She would spend the day applying for jobs, she said.
Gonzales said she wasn’t sure what she would do if care were not provided at the shelter. “I’ve tried (looking for work) before with them, and it’s hard,” she said. “I think I’d be on the streets if it wasn’t for this.”
There was a moment, four years earlier, when Newsom thought mornings like this one might come to an end.
To the people at the shelter, it always made sense that the place that offered needy families a place to stay would offer
struggling parents a place to care for their children.
At the same time, the child-care facility at UMOM needed to make sense on paper.
It always had — until 2009, when state lawmakers voted to kill funding for child-care subsidies. Those government funds had been picking up 80 percent of the center’s annual cost.
UMOM had two choices: close its childcare center or find the funds through its donors.
For Newsom, it was no choice. She knew the shelter housed an outsize number of single working mothers, families without homes of their own.
Without child care, those parents couldn’t find work. Without work, they would stay homeless.
“If we’re going to end homelessness, we need to provide for that,” Newsom said.
On that day in 2009, she saw UMOM had only one option: “We’re going to have to go out and raise that money.”
Helping families
UMOM started in a gym attached to a church in December 1987.
The Rev. Herbert Osman was quoted in a newspaper story at the time saying, “We saw a big, carpeted gym that was empty at night, and thought, ‘Why not?’ ”
At its height that winter, the gym housed 180 people. But those numbers quickly overwhelmed volunteer staff. By the next year, the United Methodist Outreach Ministries agreed to staff makeshift shelters at National Guard armories, where blankets and cots could be set up for the mostly single male homeless population.
By 1990, UMOM took over the former Sands Motel on East Van Buren Street and started using it as a family shelter that also provided career counseling and child care.
While other traditional shelters would separate residents by age and sex, UMOM would work to keep families together. By 1993 — the year UMOM applied for a grant from the inaugural Season for Sharing campaign — the 500-bed shelter housed 491 people, including 260 children.
Newsom took charge in 2002, when the center was starting to work on doing more than just being an overnight shelter. It was trying to find people a way out of homelessness.
But Newsom saw there was more to do. She wanted to put in a system at UMOM. Not all homeless people were the same, so they shouldn’t be treated the same. Not everybody would be placed in a shelter. Some who didn’t need a lot of counseling could be quickly placed back into housing, with just a helping hand. Others might need a little more intervention, maybe career or life-skills training, or alcohol or drug rehabilitation.
Others were serious cases. Freeing up bed space allowed the shelter to give those people the attention needed.
By 2009, the shelter had moved to another former motel across the street from its original location. It started providing on-site medical and pediatric care. There was a chapel for spiritual needs, a fitness center for physical ones. An on-site kitchen prepared healthy meals. There was a center where teens could hang out after school.
“It all boils down to that hope,” Newsom said. A typical shelter would provide a roof, a meal and a shower, “but it didn’t take you to the next level.”
The key to that next level was the child-care center.
UMOM had long provided some child care. But in 2005, it started providing licensed and accredited care for both children and infants.
Without this center, Newsom said, parents would struggle to find a safe spot for their chil- dren while they worked or attended school.
It was the infant care that cost the most, not just in materials, but with required staffing levels. But Newsom said it was worth the effort.
“Otherwise, a single mom who has two children, what are we going to say?” she said. “We have a place for your 3-year-old, but you have to take the bus 10 miles for your infant? How does that work?”
The shelter could absorb the costs. Subsidies — a mix of federal funds triggered by state funding — were picking up most of the $1 million annually — close to 80 percent, Newsom said.
Then the financial crisis hit the state hard. Legislators looked for places to trim in the budget, and the subsidies for child care were on the block.
Newsom tried to fight the cuts through direct lobbying, taking the 60 or so kids from the child- care center and busing them to the state Capitol. For the children, it was like a field trip, she said. But she wanted lawmakers to see that the cuts would affect actual people.
Newsom set up meetings with lawmakers. She matched donor lists with legislative districts and tried to take donors to their lawmakers to help her make the pitch.
She wasn’t successful.
Situation firsthand
After lawmakers approved the cuts, she was determined to keep the child-care center open.
Newsom said she penciled out a budget. She estimated how much she would lose in subsidies. “There’s the number and there’s the gap,” she said. “And you start figuring out how you’re going to raise that money.”
Lawmakers had cut all subsidies for new enrollees, saving the state an estimated $55 million. Existing subsidies would disappear as each family fell off the center’s rolls. The charity had a year, Newsom figured, maybe 18 months tops, before the money ran out.
She knew her population does not always engender sympathy, that the general public might think of it as throwing money away.
“The majority are single moms with two to three children who most likely don’t have their high-school diploma or GED and have a poor work history,” she said. They are in their situation because of “either bad choices they’ve made or the cycle of poverty they’ve lived in,” she said.
To help these women, Newsom knew she would have to make direct solicitations to big donors who already knew the problem. She would work the phones, send e-mails and invite donors down to show them the situation firsthand.
Ed Portnoy, director of grants programs for the Nina Pulliam Charitable Trust, remembered being taken on a tour of the child-care center. Newsom wasn’t emotional. But she was direct, he said.
“She said, ‘We’re going to have to close this place down,’ ” Portnoy said.
They walked by classrooms with children segmented by ages. They toured the shaded playground with the soft surface for the youngest ones. Newsom talked about the 35 children who were on a waiting list.
The Pulliam trust fasttracked $50,000 of emergency grant money for the child-care center in 2009. It has given a grant for the center every year since.
Asite visit was also key for the support of Renee Parsons, who with her husband, Bob, the founder of GoDaddy.com, were just starting their namesake foundation. Parsons visited UMOM in late 2009, after the subsidies had already been cut.
Parsons said seeing the center helped her understand the work it was doing. It made sense, she said, to have as many amenities close to where the families were.
“So people can get out there and don’t have to worry about what’s happening to the children,” she said. “We felt it was making a difference and not just putting a BandAid on the problem of homelessness.”
The Parsons Foundation eventually would give a $5 million donation to UMOM, allowing it to pay off the mortgage on its campus outright, saving it money on interest payments.
Doug Parker, chief executive officer of US Airways, said a facility like the child-care center can’t be appreciated in the abstract.
“These are single parents or nuclear families, and they need to work,” Parker said. “In order to do that, they have to have day care.”
Parker is one of the donors who has visited his lawmaker, along with Newsom. When he has, he said, he has made it clear that he is there as Doug Parker, constituent, not Doug Parker, CEO of the hometown airline.
He is passionate about the issue, and the work of UMOM, he said, because it makes sense.
“As you walk through the facility and see those kids being loved and nurtured and someone taking care of them, you realize, as a parent, that’s what you’re looking for,” Parker said.
He leads the Patrons group of UMOM. It is a group of high-dollar donors that spans the political spectrum, he said.
“But we agree on this,” he said. “What Darlene is doing is really important.”
Newsomwas able to assemble enough money to keep the child-care center going, even as the subsidies disappeared at both a much faster rate and greater amount than she had anticipated in 2009.
Where the subsidies used to cover 80 percent of the cost of child care, they now cover 18 percent, she said.
More than 1,100 childcare facilities have closed since 2009, according to the Arizona Child Care Association.
But Newsom credits UMOM’s success to having donors see the work the charity does up close.
“The puzzle pieces all fit together,” she said. “We create that picture for them.”
Hope ahead
It also creates a picture for the residents. One that allows them to see a future past the shelter.
Jenn Jones, 37, who became homeless for the first time a few months ago, said she had been at another shelter before UMOM. After breakfast, she and her daughter were ordered out. Some days, they would sleep in a city park.
“I never knew there were places for homeless families,” she said. And the courtesy and care afforded her and her daughter by the staff have given her a measure of dignity.
“There’s hope,” she said. “There’s life after this.”