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Community Foundation of the Ozarks officials Brian Fogle and Bridget Dierks are seeking plans to reverse poverty in the city’s northwest.
Community Foundation of the Ozarks officials Brian Fogle and Bridget Dierks are seeking plans to reverse poverty in the city’s northwest.

Work to reverse engineer poverty underway via Northwest Project

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The name is simple: the Northwest Project.

The goal is gargantuan. It’s designed to make a tangible difference in the lives of families ready to escape poverty in one of the poorest areas of Springfield.

Let’s call it reverse engineering poverty. There are many components to dismantle and maybe more pieces to fit into place for a cohesive, functional community and economic impact.

The first step involves Community Foundation of the Ozarks. President Brian Fogle said CFO has positioned the Northwest Project as a key initiative in 2016.

With 47 affiliate community foundations and managing some 2,600 charitable funds, CFO helps distribute money to organizations working on the frontlines to fight poverty and other community problems. The Northwest Project represents a change in CFO’s approach to focus more on achieving measurable positive outcomes.

“This came from some discussions our board had going back to a retreat from a couple of years ago,” Fogle said. “The whole issue of grant impact came up: ‘With our limited resources, are we having the most impact we can?’”

In the traditional approach, CFO has divvied up grant funds slated to fight poverty among nonprofits serving lower-income residents. Over time, Fogle said “red flags” identified in the annual Community Focus Report weren’t going away. For instance, the number of people below the poverty line was actually increasing.

Citing census data, the 2015 Community Focus Report found between 2010 and 2013 the percentage of people below the poverty line increased to nearly 26 percent of Springfield residents from around 23 percent.  

“We’ve been funding good programs, but we haven’t been building sustainable systems to address issues,” he said. “The red flags in 2004 are the red flags today.”

Buoyed by the city’s community listening tour in May and a poverty-fighting initiative in Jacksonville, Fla., named 1,000 in 1,000, Fogle set CFO’s sights on helping families in northwest Springfield.

In Springfield’s Zone 1, roughly 48 percent of residents fall under the federal poverty line, which is an annual income of $24,250 for a family of four.  

The Northwest Project is a collaborative effort of organizations that submit proposals for grant funds, with up to $1.3 million available over five years of renewals. After a volunteer grant panel recently reviewed initial letters of interest, three select agency collaborations were invited to submit full applications. They’re due at the end of February, said Bridget Dierks, CFO grants program officer. She said the panel in March plans to choose one proposal to implement its plan.

Fogle declined to disclose the agencies in the running but said the final group could comprise a mix of organizations from the nonprofit and public sectors. A likely partner, for example, is Springfield Public Schools because of the concentration of families and the identified problems in financial and literacy skills.

CFO has identified 10 obstacles to fighting poverty: quality child care; affordable housing; transportation; parenting and financial literacy skills; resolution of criminal background issues; job training; accountability; use of the earned income tax credit; monthly budget management; and affordable health care.

Officials have leaned on the program in Jacksonville, Fla., that aims to help 1,000 families under the poverty line over 1,000 days to increase their annual incomes by at least 15 percent.

Dawn Lockhart, president and CEO of Family Foundations of Northeast Florida, the fiscal agent and a partner agency for 1,000 in 1,000, said its pilot program started with 100 families. Forty families already have grown income by 15 percent or more.

“We’ve been working on trying to solve poverty in our country for the last 50 years and still there hasn’t been any golden key that provides the answer,” Lockhart said. “Not every family is the same. We identified a model called asset-based community development.”

By determining where families have skills that can lead to higher incomes, the community can more easily determine who is ready to beat poverty and eliminate barriers to those incomes.

Now beyond the pilot phase, an example of a systematic change is a bus route adjustment by the transportation authority to accommodate community college class schedules. The new routes, Lockhart said, raise the odds of increasing personal incomes.

In Florida’s pilot program, 65 percent of the families who attained at least seven of the social assets were successful in meeting income objectives. For families who achieved six or fewer of the assets, 31 percent were successful. For Lockhart, the program makes the return on investment by community and nonprofit agencies tangible.

“The point of this is to really change the way you think about the ROI,” she said. “As a community, we are already paying for community services to reinforce people’s positions of poverty – housing subsidies and generously supporting food banks – all those things that communities that care already do. But imagine if you thought about it differently. Imagine if you began to invest in those families who are on the cusp of being able to get out of poverty.”

In Springfield’s northwest, two programs are underway.

The city of Springfield’s Community Listen Zone Blitz also is designed to improve the quality of life in Zone 1. While there may be some overlap, the Zone Blitz is an 18-month initiative with some 150 partner organizations and 250 individuals to address public safety to chronic nuisance properties. The Northwest Project is focused specifically on increasing family incomes with predetermined grant funds.

“We are looking for collaborations that address families with children living in the home because we feel like generational poverty is a major component,” Dierks said. “We wanted to be able to impact more than one generation within a household.”

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