Portland’s economic director Melissa Hue with future Project HOME Trust participant Zeinab Hijazi, former participant Allison Edwards and her daughter and the project’s program director, Peace Mutesi, on stage at a Quality Housing Coalition Event. (Photo by Eesha Pendharkar/ Maine Morning Star)
When Zeinab Hijazi moved to Maine in 2022, she used part of the limited money she had to stay in a Portland area motel as she looked for housing. Like others seeking asylum in the United States, the Lebanese mother of two could not legally work for nearly six months, so Hijazi tried to find people who spoke her languages — French and Arabic — at the hotel front desk to seek help. That’s how she met Peace Mutesi.
Mutesi, a fellow single mother who had navigated a similarly frustrating assistance system just a year ago, shared how she managed to secure housing through the Quality Housing Coalition, a Portland-based nonprofit organization where she now works as a project manager.
As Hijazi’s funds began to run low, Mutesi offered to host her and her children in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment. That’s where Hijazi lived for 46 days, while Mutesi helped her find housing and navigate a maze of assistance programs.
Hijazi shared this story about friendship and the challenges of navigating the asylum process at an event highlighting a pioneering guaranteed income program in Portland last Tuesday evening.
Through Mutesi, Hijazi became part of QHC’s Project HOME, an initiative that works directly with landlords to connect people who are housing insecure with apartments. But beginning at the end of this month, Hijazi will start receiving an additional kind of assistance: a $1000 stipend each month, no questions asked.
For Hijazi — who was once reprimanded by a general assistance representative for using approximately $7 of her food allowance to fulfill her daughter’s request for ice cream — and 19 other single mothers facing housing insecurity, this program can be life changing. At least that was the experience of the first group of 20 women, all single mothers, who received the stipend through Project HOME Trust, Maine’s only guaranteed income program.
Participants reported greater ability to meet basic needs and cover emergency expenses, improved outlooks, and better health, which extended to their children, according to a QHC report that detailed the impact of the pilot program. These impacts were long-lasting, although they varied over time as households faced inevitable ups and downs.
For Allison Edwards, who began receiving monthly installments in 2023, the money meant not having to choose between childcare and dropping out of school at Southern Maine Community College. More importantly, it bought her time with her daughter, she said.
“At the end of the day, I was able to come home and spend time with [her] and watch her reach those developments and milestones instead of being distracted with paying the bills,” Edwards said at the Project HOME Trust event.
Part of the success of the program, which is hard to capture in a report, was its ability to build a community of single mothers who supported each other throughout the year, according to Victoria Morales, QHC’s executive director.
“Even though our participants were from three separate counties, they didn’t all know each other. There were several different languages spoken. But they created a community,” she said.
“When you know you have your people, you know you’re not alone. And we think that’s critical for folks to be stabilized and then move forward and pursue their goals.”
The experiment showcased the need to restructure public benefits programs
Guaranteed income provides regular, unrestricted cash payments to supplement primary income sources, and does not have any restrictions on how recipients spend the money. There are at least 155 programs across 35 states testing the viability of guaranteed income. Researchers at Columbia University found that the programs can help significantly reduce poverty, even at low guaranteed income rates of $250 per month. It can also help meet basic needs, allowing people who don’t qualify for other assistance programs to meet educational and career goals, according to the Maine Center for Economic Policy.
The first year of Project HOME Trust found all that to be true. A yearlong study tracked the 20 participants and a control group of those who applied but weren’t selected for the pilot Project HOME Trust cohort.
At the program’s outset, just 5% of participants and 6% of control group members said they were “doing okay” or better financially. One year later, that percentage was unchanged for the control group, but had risen to 53% of participants, the report found. Before the program started, an overwhelming majority of both group members — 79% — said it was “very” or “somewhat” difficult to pay for basic needs, and that number shrank to 26% of participants. Forty-two percent said they would be able to handle an emergency $400 expense, up from 5% before the program started.
The idea behind the program was to replace what Morales called “shame-based programing,” referring to programs that limit how funds or other assistance, such as Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, can be used, and the social stigma surrounding it. Instead, Project HOME Trust showed that the group of single mothers spent the money bettering their and their children’s lives, spending the allocated amounts to help pay for rent, childcare, or to continue their education and launch the career paths of their choice.
“I think guaranteed income needs to show that it works in these small ways, and then we can absolutely change our state and federal policies so that they look like this,” said Morales, reflecting on the project’s success.
“The money for public assistance is there. It doesn’t have to have all of the barriers which are costly and also harmful to the people who are receiving the assistance.”
Right now, the selection process for the guaranteed income program is a lottery system. The nonprofit receives calls daily from moms asking for help, Morales said, demonstrating a need to expand it. However, it is currently funded through donors and grants from the city of Portland, limiting the program’s ability to expand to 40 single moms in 2025 and 2026, as Morales envisions.
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