National Disability Institute Webinar Transcript – Understanding the Family Self-Sufficiency Program
May 14, 2014 – 3:00pm
Keith Combs:Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Keith Combs, manager of financial empowerment and I will be moderating today's webinar. Thank you for joining us today. For the Real Economic Impact network webinar on Understanding the Family Self-Sufficiency P rogram. Today's webinar is sponsored by Acorda Therapeutics, Bank of America, and Walmart. Nakia Matthews, MDIs technology and media manager, will provide us with some housekeeping tips for today's webinar.
Nakia Matthews: Good afternoon, everyone. The audio for today's webinar is being broadcast through your computer. Please make sure your speakers are turned on and your headphones on -- our plug-in. You can control the audio broadcast panel via the audio broadcast panel that you see here below. If you accidentally close this panel, where the sound stops, you can reopen the audio broadcast panel by going to the top menu i tem, communicate, and then join audio broadcast. If you do not have sound capabilities on your computer or you prefer to listen by phone, you can dial the number you see here and enter the meeting code. You do not need to enter an attendee ID. I will also post this number into the chat box for those who might join a little bit late. Realtime captioning is provided during this webinar. The captions can be found in the media viewer panel which appears in the lower right corner of the webinar platform. If you'd like to make the media viewer panel larger, you can do so by minimizing some of the other panels like chat, Q&A or panelist. Conversely, if you do not need captions, you can minimize the media viewer panel. There will be a question and answer portion at the end of the webinar. If you have any questions, please use the chat box or the Q&A box to send any questions you may have during the course of the webinar to either Keith Combs or to myself, Nakia Matthews. And we will direct those questions accordingly during the Q&A portion. If you're listening by phone and not locked into the web portion, you may also ask questions by e-mailing them directly to Keith at . This webinar is being recorded and webinars will be placed on our website at If you experience any technical difficulties during the webinar, please use the chat box to send me, Nakia Matthews, a message. You may also e-mail me at .
> Keith?
Keith Combs: Thank you, Nakia. We would like to thank our sponsors today including Walmart, Bank of America, Acorda Therapeutics, the Burton Blatt Institute, and the I RS, without their sponsorship and support, we would not be able to provide the webinar such as we do today. If you're not familiar with National Disability Institute, we are a national research and development organization with the mission to promote income preservation and asset development for persons with disabilities and to build a better economic future for Americans with disabilities. The Real Economic Impact network is an alliance of organizations and individuals dedicated to advancing the economic empowerment of people with disabilities, the network consists of more than 900 partners and more than 100 cities in the United States. The network includes nonprofits, community, tax coalitions, asset development organizations, financial education initiatives, corporations, and private sector businesses, federal, state, local governments and agencies and individuals and families with disabilities. All of the partners in the Real Economic Impact's network join forces to embrace, promote and pursue access to and inclusion of people with disabilities in the economic mainstream. In today's webinar, we're going to receive an introduction and overview of the Family Self-Sufficiency program. We are going to have a discussion of eligibility and how individuals and families can apply for the FSS program. We're going to receive an explanation of the benefits of the Family Self-Sufficiency program and we're also going to hear some examples of how the FSS has directly benefited individuals with disabilities. And there will be approximately 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the webinar for questions and answers for our panelists. Some of the outcomes that we are hoping that you are going to receive from the webinar today are learning the benefits of the FSS, learning the eligibility requirements of the SSS, as well as resources available to those individuals and families that are accepted into the program as well as the positive impacts that the FSS can have for individuals with disabilities and learn some real-life examples of successes of graduates from the Family Self-Sufficiency program. We have two wonderful presenters with us today. The first is going to be Darrin Dorsett. He is with the department of Housing and Urban Development. Darrin is a program analyst and works in the housing voucher management and operations division. Prior to joining HUD, Darrin worked with the national Association of Counties providing technical assistance to elected county officials on the use of HUD funds. Prior to working with the national Association of Counties, Darrin worked with the national consulting firm providing technical assistance to local, state and federal agencies on a range of affordable housing and community development programs. Karen has a Masters in urban and regional planning. And we also have Sharon Hirota with us today, who is going to be giving us some real-life examples of successes that she has seen from individuals in the FSS program. Sharyn is currently employed as the existing housing division manager for the County of Hawaii office of housing and community development. As the division manager, Sharon has oversight responsibility for the housing choice voucher or Section 8 program, the tenant-based rental assistance program, the residential emergency home repair program, as well as an elderly and family housing project. Sharon joined the oh HCD -- OHCD in 2002. She had positions of increasing responsibility to include human resources and risk management. Sharon also attended the University of Hawaii majoring in business administration. With that, I would like to turn it over to Darrin, who's going to talk to us about the FSS program overall.
Darrin Dorsett: Good afternoon. Can you hear me?
Keith Combs:Yes, we can.
Darrin Dorsett:Okay. Great. Thank you, Keith, Nakia, and staff at the National Disability Institute for inviting us to participate in today's panel. I bring you greetings from HUD, the housing voucher management and operation division our director and members of our FSS team, Briyona Bender and Maurice Rodriguez will not be present to participate in the program panel today. I briefly wanted to provide an overview of HUD's Family Self-Sufficiency program. I'm going to call it FSS program. As I go through some of the slides. Again, to provide a basic overview of the program, the overall objective of the program is to reduce dependency on welfare assistance and to promote independence and self-sufficiency. We like to think that it is a pretty successful program, yet it's an underutilized program. We'll talk about that in a little while. Generally speaking, about HUD's family self sufficiency program up until this year, under FY2014 funding under the director from Congress, there was an FSS program that targeted public housing residents in a separate FSS programs that targeted housing choice voucher or Section 8 participants. Generally speaking the rules were the same but again, there was a different population targeted. One, public housing residents and the other, Section 8 vouchers holders. A couple of components of FSS programs, obviously we want to help individuals and families achieve self-sufficiency. One way to do that and one component of the program is to provide supportive services. Supportive services, I'm sure you're familiar with those, job training, counseling, child care, transportation, education and other supportive services while participants in the program are receiving housing assistance, so that they can actually obtain education employment and other skills necessary to achieve self-sufficiency. Another component -- a big driving force behind a program other than the participants and agencies that administer the program are public housing authorities action plans. The action plan describes the policies and procedures for operating the housing authority's FSS program. As part of the plan, they must describes outreach efforts to reach eligible families. Within this action plan, they also have to provide a certification of coordination. That's certification is provided that services and activities provided under the program have been coordinated with public and private providers including the Java job program, the job training partnership act, the Department of Labor funded job training programs, other employers, childcare, transportation, and education and other training type programs. This is really important as public housing authorities describe what are the outreach efforts. Are they making sufficient strides to reach businesses in the community? Are they doing everything necessary that they can do to help promote the Family Self-Sufficiency program? Again, the whole point of the program is to obviously increase self sufficiency. We want to make sure that agencies are doing everything they can to provide services to those participants to help achieve their goals. Next slide is on FSS administration or administering FSS program. The FSS program is administered by public housing agencies with the help of program coordinating committees or PCC's. These PCC's are made up of several representatives of the local community. We are talking about local government, employers, job training agencies, welfare agencies, nonprofit service providers as well as local businesses. Within these PCC's, there must be a housing authority representative and a voucher program participant or public housing residents per the rules in 24 CFR 984.202. The main function of this committee is to assist the public housing agencies in obtaining public and private commitments for the operation of the asset -- of the FSS program. We'd like to encourage PCC's to actively participate in development of the PHA's action plan and actually implementing the program. We constantly encourage PHA's to look at membership of their PCC's and look at ways to help promote new services to clients. Oftentimes PCC's have been established and there's no new membership or blood into the PCC's. So something that we encourage P HA's or housing agencies to do is to go back out into the community, emphasize what they are doing in the FSS program, and step up and outreach efforts in order to serve clients better. Critical components to the FSS program -- I'm going to talk about three things. First, a contract. This is a contract of participation. This contract is between Housing Authority and participants. This specifies what the rights and responsibilities are of both parties. It is a contract. It sets for the general terms and conditions of participation in the program. This is a critical part of what the FSS program is about. Because again it lets everybody know up front, this is exactly what's expected of you. It's a five-year contract of participation, which is possibly extended for two years given some unusual circumstances. A second critical part of the FSS program is an individual training and service plan or ITSP. Created for each participant of the program. This plan is basically developed by the head of household in each adult member of the FSS family who decides to participate in the program. This ITSP sets for all the services that will be provided to the family and also articulates the activities to be completed by each family member. As well as the completion dates for services, as I mentioned, this is a contract of participation, not a contract -- not something you just throw away or lack of participation. We're constantly asking participants to do their part in the PHA to do their part as well. I'm going to quickly talk about interest-bearing escrow account. Another critical part -- component of the FSS program. This is one of the selling points of the program. Again, when I mentioned that this was an underutilized program, something that can help promote the program is interest-bearing escrow account. The whole idea here is to have an incentive program or some type of incentive for families to participate in the program, whether or not you are a housing choice voucher holder or whether or not you are a public housing resident. Ultimately as you achieve your goals, in your ITSP, hopefully you will be saving money or you will be saving money. And you'll be closer to economic independence. I'll talk a little bit how the escrow account works. Basically HUD deposits money into an escrow account every time a tenant's share of rent is increased due to a raise in your household income or wages. A quick example -- say a family becomes enrolled in an FSS program and their rent share is $30. They don't have any monthly escrow as of yet. Year one. Year two, the individual gets a part-time job and their rent share increases to $200. Again, the jumping rent from their rent share from $30 to $200 is a $170 difference. That $170 will be deposited to the -- into the family's FSS escrow account. Again over a period of time, you can imagine the type of savings as individuals go through the FSS program, continue to receive services, and other benefits and improve their job situation and improve employment opportunities. Families will be able to save quite a bit of money. And I'm sure Sharon will talk about that a little bit later as she goes through some examples in Hawaii. Again, within the FSS escrow account, families and possibly -- can possibly receive interim disbursement during the contract term to complete some of their goals. Some families have taken out escrow to pay tuition for college. Some have been able to disburse or receive some of the money so that they can buy a car. That car will help them get to work or drive a little further to get to a better job. Again, that's one component of the FSS escrow account. Again, in order to claim that escrow at contract completion at the end of five years, the head of household must be employed and no family member should be receiving or can be receiving welfare assistance. Again, you don't participate in the program for a number of years, stay on welfare, and receive a huge payout at the end of the contract term. In order for that contract to be successfully completed, the individual or the head of household has to be employed and not receiving welfare assistance. Jumping over to the next slide, I'll talk about who's eligible to participate in FSS. As I mentioned earlier, prior to this year, it was a separate program for public housing residents, as well as individuals that participate in the housing choice voucher or Section 8 p rogram. Both are eligible to participate in the program. However, it is voluntary for families to participate as individuals get on Section 8 or public housing, they are not required to participate in the program. But again, the targeted population that FSS tends to serve are unemployed or underemployed public housing residents and housing choice voucher program p articipants. Again, there's a little bit of misinformation or confusion about who can serve in the program. Again, individuals or participants with the household head who has a disability, they are able to participate. They are eligible to participate. One component of it -- of being enrolled in the program is finding employment. And for individuals with disabilities, that does not mean a full-time -- not necessarily does not mean a full-time job. Again, the ITSP or the individual training and service plan, if an individual has a an, if an individual has a disability, some of the goals within that plan can be adjusted so that person with disabilities can accomplish their goals. A person with disabilities may not be able to work for 80 hours a w eek. Sorry, 80 hours biweekly. Again, goals within the plan our adjusted to each family. There's no cookie-cutter ITSP. We always encourage public housing authorities to work with individual families so that the goals that are within the ITSP can make sure that their -- that they are family specific. We also encourage PHA's to review the plan on a regular basis and to modify it if necessary. We also ask for PHA's to work closer with families so that they can better assess what their strengths are, what their individual needs are, what the household needs are and what are some of the barriers as well as setting goals and developing a workable plan with actual supportive services that providers and PCC can provide. Again, the whole purpose of the program is for families to achieve self-sufficiency. It's not about pushing a couple of pieces of paper, getting families in and out. We still want to make an impact on families lives. I'm going to jump over to how is FSS funded? In the FSS program, if you will, the services are not funded by the program. Public housing authorities are required to leverage their public funds and private resources in order to provide supportive services. I know some housing authorities, they say, how can I do this? Again, as I talked about, this program being an underutilized program that we found that in several best practices that there are companies, service providers that are out there, private companies out there that are willing to partner with agencies with -- public housing agencies if they knew what the program was about. And if they knew that there was an impact in communities. So there are several examples of public-private partnerships that have worked extremely well. Again, those are the type of partnership that we encourage. Again, we do ask public housing authorities to help leverage resources. In funding for FSS or Family Self-Sufficiency Program coordinators is provided from HUD through annual notice of funding availabilities. It's open right now to provide salary and fringe benefits for FSS program coordinators. A brief history on FSS. Again, started in fiscal year 1993. Public housing authorities were required to develop an FSS program for families if they received new funding for their Section 8 certificates for vouchers or the public housing rental units. Mandatory minimum FSS program requirements for the Section 8 certificates or voucher and public housing programs were based on the number of new units funded. Again, this mandatory minimum applied to several hundred PHA's. And again they are required to implement an FSS program. And really, briefly some changes to the FSS program over the years, when their new allocations of rental certificates or new public housing units after October 21, 1998, no longer an increase for mandatory FSS program slots or s ize. A PHA's mandatory minimum FSS program size is reduced by one slot for each graduate. For example, if Honolulu had a mandatory program of 25 slots or 25 participants and a graduated 25, again, it was reduced by 25. Another change was that confirmed continued authorities wear PJs administer voluntary FSS programs -- where PHAs administer voluntary programs. If I could again provide a quick snapshot --