Sunday, November 8, 2009

ReNew Athens

This is one of the most promising ideas in the community in a long, long time. It identifies an existing gap in service - owner-occupied housing for individuals making $25,000 or less - and delivers it by renovating existing, vacant housing stock. In addition, it's going to make all the structures green-friendly, so it truly is a win-win.

Having worked with various non-profit agencies in town, one of the great potentials I see is the ability to connect with existing ones for referrals. For instance, existing non-profits that provide services to low-income individuals could form a membership and set up a pool of funds to partially subsidize the rents of their referrals for a dedicated amount of time (with the subsidy gradually decreasing to let the homeowners take on more and more responsibility).

Likewise, this program will merely provide the housing, thus not duplicating the existing case management services throughout the community (and, perhaps ReNew Athens could have its own pool of funds available to assist with those services for referring agencies which extend those services).

There's a lot of potential to make this work, so kudos to those involved with it.