Group seeks to expand the reach of One Month’s Rent
By Janene Holzberg, For The Baltimore Sun janeneholzberg76@gmail.com Copyright © 2015, The Baltimore Sun
When life throws hardworking low-wage earners a curve, they might end up living on the streets.
That’s the harsh reality that in 2004 spurred a local book club to take action to change these workers’ fates.
More than 11 years and a quarter-million in donations later, the One Month’s Rent Initiative has become a well-oiled machine that has helped 180 Howard County households avoid eviction and homelessness with a one-time housing subsidy during personal, economic or medical emergencies.
The founders say that the group’s success can easily be replicated by other clubs — and they’d love to show them how.
“The model we’ve set up runs so smoothly that we feel we don’t deserve all this credit,” said Anne Dodd, who helped found One Month’s Rent through the Hopewell Book Club, a 12-member group formed in 1980.
“We’d love to visit clubs that may think it’s difficult to accomplish when it’s not,” she said.
Dodd said that after reading “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, the book club felt compelled to be part of the solution.
In the 2001 nonfiction work, the author recounts her two years of working undercover at low-wage jobs and living in residential motels and trailer parks. Her firsthand account of the toll that lack of access to affordable housing takes shook club members to their core.