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Rylee Barnsdale: You're listening to 89.1 WEMU. I'm Rylee Barnsdale, and this is On the Ground Ypsi. The Ypsilanti-based non-profit, A Brighter Way, has been providing a number of services, including mentoring to formerly incarcerated individuals since 2016. But just recently, the organization purchased a home right here in Ypsi, just a few blocks away from their office, to add long-term transitional housing to their list of services for their clients. Today, I'm here with A Brighter Way's executive director, Adam Grant, to learn a bit more about how this service will work and what having this resource available means to the community A Brighter Way serves directly. Hi, Adam! Thanks so much for being here today!
Adam Grant: Thanks for having me!
Rylee Barnsdale: So, A Brighter Way's cornerstone program really is this peer-led mentoring program. This is led by its own staff of folks, who are also returning citizens, to help guide clients towards community resources and opportunities once they are back home. What motivated you to kind of take this leap into adding this long-term transitional housing to all of the services that A Brighter Way already offers?
Adam Grant: There are certain things that, year after year, decade after decade, you hear are obstacles to people's reentry back into society: employment, transportation and at the top of that is usually housing. There usually are some temporary housing options that are maybe 90 days, maybe even 180. But a lot of times people need a longer launch pad than that, especially since housing is one of those areas that people are extremely biased when it comes to allowing people were formally incarcerated to rent properties. So, we're trying to create a situation where they get an opportunity to build up their credit, they get in opportunity to build up their income stream and they get an opportunity to have more than one avenue for housing, including homeownership if they want to, which we know takes a while to do anywhere, but especially in Washtenaw County.
Rylee Barnsdale: There are options as far as short-term housing goes for returning citizens. What are some of the other roadblocks or challenges that you're hoping to mitigate with this resource now available?
Adam Grant: Well, one of the things that we do is that when you come home, there's so many things you have to do and you have do them all at once and you feel like you're playing catch up. We want to be able to kind of slow things down a little bit. We want them to be to spend some time, not only working, but also working on themselves, working on family reunification, things of that nature. So, one of things that we are providing within the home is that we're providing soft skill classes and hard skill classes. We don't like talking about budgeting. We like talking about their relationship with money. You know, we want people to have strong family ties. We encourage community service and activity in one's community. So, we create a lot of opportunities for them to see their own value in the community, which makes it easier to put their personal lives together as well.
Rylee Barnsdale: Was a resource like this or getting into transitional housing something that you've been wanting to implement at A Brighter Way or was it just the right set of circumstances with the right set of people that kind of led to having it now?
Adam Grant: Well, it was a combination of all those things: right place, right time, right people, including the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. And they were ready. This has always been kind of a little bit of a hope and a dream. It just hasn't been something that has really been attainable, and it's not attainable for most nonprofits. We would not have been able to make it happen this year if it wasn't for the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. And the way things change in non-profits in the political environment, it's kind of hard to be able to get that kind of traction.
Rylee Barnsdale: You mentioned a couple of the things that folks living in the house will have access to the resources and conversations that can be had within the house. How does the mentoring piece of A Brighter Way kind of fold into this new service as well? What does the mentoring kind of side of things look like?
Adam Grant: Well, we have 144 years of incarceration working in our office. So, we're helping people to navigate systems that we've navigated ourselves. And we use that term "navigation" very consciously because of the fact that all of us are aware of what Google Maps or Waze or something like that does. It doesn't tell you how you have to travel. It makes suggestions. And then, if you make a different turn, it will reroute you, so that the ultimate point is to be able to get you to your final destination. So, that's kind of what the navigation that we do is we don't tell people what to do, we don't people how to get there, we tell them routes to get their work side by side with them. They may have holes in their resume. Their interview techniques may be a little bit off because they haven't had to interview in so long. They may want to go back to school. There's all these things that they may want to do, and we kind of free them to do it. And I use the launch pad example of this. Long-term transitional housing creates a longer runway for people. Some people are helicopters, and they can take off of a launch pad. Some need a little bit of a runway for smaller planes, and some are bigger planes that take much more runway to get off the ground. We're trying to create more runway for them to be able to get off the ground.
Rylee Barnsdale: You mentioned the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. Are there other partnerships that are new, or maybe even just broadening or expanding, to kind of help lengthen that runway, so to speak?
Adam Grant: Oh, we are blessed in Washtenaw County to have a lot of partners! And don't get in trouble because I'm definitely going to miss some. Some of the ones that are specifically working with us on housing and have been for a while is the Ann Arbor Area Thrift Store. They've been amazing since they transfer over to their emergency grant, and having people in the community contribute to those. They have been able to help us get housing for so many people and made this possible. Another one is House N2 Home. They've been helping our people. And what they do is exactly what it says. They just don't help you have a place or somewhere to lay your head. They help turn it into a home, so you have one less thing to worry about. So, anything you can do to create an environment that is cohesive to positive change, then you're winning the game.
Rylee Barnsdale: This is WEMU's On the Ground Ypsi. I'm talking with A Brighter Way Executive Director, Adam Grant. So, Adam, we talked a little bit about some of the challenges that folks reentering their communities from incarceration might face. But I'm curious about how this transitional housing option can potentially mitigate some of those. But I am wondering why is a service like this, or a resource like this, may be urgent or necessary for returning citizens here in Ypsi or, more broadly, the greater Washtenaw County area. And I'm wondering what that impact might look like on folks that are coming back to the community.
Adam Grant: Well, I mean, as most people know listening to this, Washtenaw County is a challenging housing market, to say the least, even when you have the best of circumstances. Recently, I attended a meeting that said Washtennaw County's median rent has outpaced the median income for over 10 years now. That's no more apparent than when you're talking about people who were formerly incarcerated are naturally going to earn at least 30 or 40% less than their counterparts, often working or kind of piecing part-time work together, so they don't have other benefits. So, this just creates an opportunity for them to create some time to create some steady income, to repair their credit. Many of them are coming out after long terms of incarceration and have worse than no credit--I mean, low credit, they have no credit. And so, they have to build it up from scratch. We have a curriculum to help teach them how to be able to do that and do it in a very conscious way. Yeah, that's the big thing! Washtenaw County is an amazing community, but we've also amenitized to such a point that it is very difficult for people to get into the housing market, especially with lower income.
Rylee Barnsdale: Is there any hope on your end that implementing this resource could maybe inspire other organizations with similar missions to also pursue this kind of avenue to provide a long-term transitional housing resource to the community, or does this seem like something that is going to be unique to A Brighter Way?
Adam Grant: I am a fountain of hope! So, I believe that everything that we do has the potential to inspire other people and other organizations, and I hope other organizations do. I do hope that they take a very trauma-informed approach like we do and don't just do as previous transitionals have done. There's a lot of things that are institutional by nature by the way that policies and procedures are put together. And those are good, because what they do is they protect the person running the organization or they protect the organization as a whole. The problem is that institutions look like one another. And so, if somebody has been incarcerated for any period of time, those things have a tendency to brush up on traumas. We are very low on rules and very big on principles. Because many people learned how to follow rules in prison but didn't learn how to live a principled life and make decisions for themselves. We don't want them to just have a place to stay until their next one. We want them have a space to stay and grow, so that they become better for their next leg of the journey.
Rylee Barnsdale: Well, Adam, thank you so much for being here today! A Brighter Way does a lot of great work for our neighbors and our community members that maybe need a little bit of extra help. And it's really wonderful to see that work expand and be so well-received!
Adam Grant: Well, thank you for having me!
Rylee Barnsdale: For more information on today's topic and links to the full article, visit our website at WEMU.org. On the Ground Ypsi is brought to you in partnership with Concentrate Media. I'm Rylee Barnsdale, and this is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU-FM Ypsilanti. Celebrating 60 years of broadcasting at Eastern Michigan University!
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