The Initiative Inc.
Regina Rankin, Executive Director
1306 Hope St.
Vicksburg, Miss. 39180
(601) 638-8545

When I visited the organizers of this model transitional housing and support program for homeless families five years ago, the bricks-and-mortar phase of the project was still just a happy dream. Today, it is a reality, a circle of nine attractive white-frame houses and a modern community center and day-care facility surrounding a bright playground in a shady, park like setting, with four more houses under construction. It has built a solid track record, with its first "class" of nine homeless families graduated after a two-year program, every single one of them employed, every single one of them off AFDC and working, not at "burger-flipping" jobs but in the fields for which their newly achieved educational attainments prepared them.

What makes this success doubly miraculous is that political bad news could have doomed the project entirely. A pilot program that had the full support of former Gov. Ray Mabus, a progressive Democrat, it lost all its state funding when Mabus was ousted by Republican Kirk Fordice, an extreme conservative whose attitude toward anything he considers "welfare" was to remove its funding -- even if it demonstrably built self-reliance.

The state's other Special Initiative Project, in Metcalfe, Miss., failed to survive the funding cut. But Vicksburg's SIP barely noticed the loss of state money, Regina Rankin says, because it had moved from the beginning to diversify its funding base in the pragmatic realization that any one source could dry up without notice. With income from sources as diverse as city and private funding, Section 8 subsidies for the residents of the complex, and US Department of Agriculture nutrition money for its day-care center (which is also open to children from the surrounding community), the program newly renamed "Initiative Inc." kept right on going, spun off as an independent non-profit by V'Burg Inc., the community-development corporation that originally raised the $1.1 million to build it. The housing complex, built on the site of a former drive-in theater on a street renamed "Hope Street" to exemplify the dream that brings people there, is so attractive that it was covered in a feature article in a national magazine of architecture.

Initiative Inc., exactly as originally planned, breaks the cycle of poverty for homeless families by providing them quality housing in the complex's single-family houses, with Section 8 picking up the rent, while providing day care and tutorial programs for each family's youngsters, case management and counseling for the adults. Families normally stay in the program for two to three years while the adult completes educational, career and personal objectives based on an individualized plan worked out with a case manager. Services ranging from drug and alcohol counseling to higher education are provided by a partnership of 28 public and private human-service agencies.

Of the first nine graduates, six completed the associate in arts degree at Hinds Community College, and the remaining three are well on their way to the degree. All are working, at jobs ranging from a city hall employee to a clerical supervisor in a riverboat casino, and all nine have gotten themselves off the AFDC rolls.

Having learned well the lesson of operating with high efficiency, Initiative Inc. gets its job done with a staff of just five, and a lean annual operating budget of $153,000. With its goal of helping families become self-sufficient, it does an exemplary job of being self-sufficient itself.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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