President's Desk - Nov 2008

From the President's Desk - Nov 2008

By Hugh Brady

This has been a good news month. There is the good legislative news in our Legislative Update, and the good news from the NAMI Walk. Now here’s some good news on housing:

For several years Catholic Charities, Alexian Bothers mental health center and a group of NAMI chapters, including NAMI Barrington Area, have been working with the Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County on a grant by the US Department of Housing and Urban Renewal (HUD) to provide 20 units of permanent supportive housing for individuals with mental illness who are also homeless.

Last year at this time, you may recall, we were very optimistic that the grant would be made and the housing project created. Grants for new projects like these are very competitive and we were the number one ranked new project in suburban Cook County. Grants applications are scored on a point basis, and this application had enough points that using the previous year’s measure, HUD would have awarded the grant. Unfortunately, last year HUD didn’t have enough money to fund grants at the previous year’s level, and so they raised the grant awarding bar to fund fewer projects and our grant did not have enough points to be awarded. We were more than disappointed.

However, this year, the Alliance will reallocate some funds from an earlier HUD recipient which is not planning to use all its grant money next year to fund part of the Catholic Charities/ NAMI project.

Under the new plan HUD will fund 7 beds of permanent supportive housing from the old plan and the 13 additional beds will go through the same competitive process as last year. So that means that when the funds are actually released some time next summer Catholic Charities will be able to establish 7 housing units for homeless persons with mental illness, and depending on how the competitive process goes, may also be able to establish the other 13 units.