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Basic Needs Overview
DEFINITION: For this assessment, Basic Needs has been defined as emergency food, clothing and housing (rent, mortgage, utility) assistance. While there are a wide range of other services and supports that may be essential for an individual to reach self-sufficiency (child care, affordable housing, health care, education, to name a few), this assessment is focused on assistance to meet immediate, crisis situations.
KEY FINDINGS: While Travis County has experienced a prolonged period of tremendous economic growth, the need for basic needs assistance has not gone away. Despite an unemployment rate of just 2.6% (Texas Workforce Commission estimate for June 1999), Travis County continues to have a poverty rate of over 12% (Census Bureau estimate, 1999). Persistent poverty, combined with steady increases in the cost of living have served to increase the demand for emergency basic needs assistance. The Travis County Emergency Assistance Program reports an increase in persons receiving assistance from 12,491 to 21,468 (up 72%) from FY95-FY98, and an increase in the number of people they were unable to assist from 7,296 to 16,703 (up 129%) over the same period. This increase has taken place while the number of unemployed residents has declined slightly (-4%) from 1995 to 1998.
While much of the data referenced in this report comes from Travis County programs, many other faith-based and community-based organizations provide basic needs assistance. While only the County emergency assistance program collects this data, many other providers report similar trends.
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BARRIERS: Across the whole system, both public and private providers, several barriers have been identified that both prevent immediate needs from being met and serve to keep basic needs customers from becoming self-sufficient.
- Eligibility Guidelines: In most cases, income eligibility guidelines for basic needs are extremely low and prevent all but the most impoverished from receiving assistance. Also, eligibility guidelines rarely allow individuals to receive assistance more than a few times a year.
- Availability of Services: An individual can receive only a small amount of assistance from a given provider, barely sufficient to meet immediate needs. Although these limits do serve to stretch available resources to serve more customers, they severely limit the ability of the customer to achieve self-sufficiency. In addition it is difficult to access services during evenings and weekends.
- Coordination among Service Providers: Most basic needs providers have informal referral relationships with others, but few formal arrangements that could ease the paperwork and time burden on recipients.
- Lack of Long Term Support: While the services provided fill an extremely important need in our community, they contribute little to customers becoming self-sufficient. There is little capacity to provide case management or long term continuity of support that could link basic needs assistance with other services that could facilitate the achievement of self-sufficiency.
- Transportation: The dispersed nature of basic needs providers in our community, and the limits of public transportation, greatly hinders the opportunities for low income residents to access needed supports and services (including education and training) that could lead to self-sufficiency.
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RECOMMENDATIONS: Based upon research into best practices, input from provider focus groups conducted in July 1999, and survey responses from customers (also July 1999), the following actions are recommended.
- Increase the level of investment to match the scale of the problem. As noted above, the number of people both receiving and denied assistance has increased steadily, even as our overall economy has continued to thrive.
- Promote collaboration among providers. Intake processes and eligibility screening could be simplified and information shared to create a more customer friendly system. As a starting point, Travis County will reinitiate community resource meetings among providers to promote information sharing and networking.
- Reduce the demand for emergency food assistance. Access available federal funding to expand the summer nutrition program (companion to the free/reduced school lunch program) to serve all eligible students in Travis County.
- Assess community needs. More careful study of Transportation needs should be undertaken to assess the transportation needs particular to low-income residents of our community. In addition, enhanced efforts should continue to assess the special needs of rural Travis County.
- Support case management. In addition to the above recommendations, this process has identified the need for a more long-term focus in this and most other issue areas. To support both a more long-term outlook and greater connection across services and providers, resources should be invested to encourage case management. This would allow providers to both address immediate needs and connect the many varied services in the community to promote self-sufficiency and enable more independent living.
The Austin/Travis County Welfare to Work Coalition has developed a self-sufficiency model that could be useful in addressing issues of collaboration and case management. In the meantime, our community must, at minimum, maintain our efforts to meet basic needs for food, clothing and shelter.
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