“Columbia was built on the premise of affordable housing for everyone; it was part of Jim Rouse’s dream,” said Dodd, a retired Ellicott City resident who served as Kings Contrivance village manager for 28 years.
“We decided to focus on people who work hard at low-income, full-time jobs but can’t make their next rent or mortgage payment or security deposit. These aren’t people who are lying around doing nothing, but people who need help getting over a hump so they don’t end up out in the street,” she said.
The daunting challenge members faced in carrying out their mission almost doomed the humanitarian project before it could get off the ground — until they hooked up with the Community Action Council of Howard County.
“We had asked ourselves, ‘How would we find deserving people and how would we vet them?’ ” said Jane Parrish, OMR president and a retired Hickory Ridge village manager with 31 years’ service.
That’s when the book club turned to the action council due to its “broad appeal to the largest number of people in the population we wanted to reach,” Dodd said.
According to information on the Community Action Council website, just over 5 percent of the county’s 300,000 residents live in poverty.
While not all book club members participate and a number of One Month’s Rent’s nine board members are joined in the initiative by their husbands, the group’s fundraising is handled through an annual newsletter each September. Donations are solicited from family, friends and corporate sponsors.
The nonprofit Long and Foster Columbia Gives organization holds One Month’s Rent fundraisers twice a year that bring in between $2,000 and $3,000 each, Parrish said.
“Every nickel we collect goes to CAC,” Parrish said, noting the club absorbs administrative costs. “We help them, and they help us achieve our goal; we scratch each other’s backs.”
Throughout the year, the action council emails One Month’s Rent board members a paragraph describing needs of clients (who remain anonymous), and they vote on whether to permit the council to disburse the requested funds from their CAC-managed account directly to the landlord or mortgage company.
While the dollar amount varies, each household received an average of $1,355 in 2015, Parrish said. One Month’s Rent has distributed $235,340 since its inception and currently has $15,900 in the bank.
Bita Dayhoff, president of the Community Action Council, said one example of the 24 households helped this year is a woman whose hours as a casino worker were cut during the Baltimore riots and subsequent curfew in April.
With a one-time payout from One Month’s Rent, the client was able to pay her past-due rent, avoiding eviction until the casino returned to a regular schedule and her shift was available again.
“One Month’s Rent is a critical part of CAC’s homeless prevention programming,” Dayhoff said, adding that the council has helped an average of 335 households avoid eviction over each of the last seven years, including the clients subsidized by One Month’s Rent.