About Anawim Housing

The mission of Anawim Housing is to provide safe, affordable housing which assists in the stabilization of low-income families and the revitalization of the Des Moines Metropolitan Neighborhoods. 

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Two moms and the value of Anawim

Two young women, both of them mothers, struggling financially.  Both find their way to Anawim Housing, both seeking a place that is safe and affordable, a place where their children can call home.  One of them has been part of the Anawim family for years, and has graduated to home ownership.  The other, who only recently found a home with Anawim, is the kind of person for whom a new Anawim program was designed.  Their stories, and what Anawim Housing means to them, follow.

Optimism in a distressing time for a single mother at Anawim

Having a room for each of her two children was important to this struggling young mom

Alice Jones clearly recalls what her mother told her when she was planning to drop out of Saydel High School after her freshman year.

“Mom always said that if I dropped out I would be cleaning toilets and cooking for someone else,” says Jones, 30.

Mom was right.

Alice Jones is now cooking for a local nursing home.  Before that she worked in the housekeeping department of a local hospital.  Cleaning toilets was part of the job.

Her financial situation has never been good, but it’s especially tight now.  Because of a low census, her employer has cut back on her hours and her take-home pay.  She also has rent, a car payment, car insurance and payments for furniture she bought for her two children, Keyonah, 6, and Keyon, who was born in October.  And groceries.  She’s also paying off some bad checks, checks she wrote with insufficient funds in the bank to cover the draft.

On top of that, a fourth of her paycheck is being garnished to pay off a debt she incurred at Broadlawns Medical Center when she had some problems early in her pregnancy with Kenyon.

“I though I was losing him,” says Jones, whose first son was stillborn when she was just 18.  “I was very nervous; money was not at the top of mind at the time.”  She had no insurance, and her husband, soon to be her ex, is in prison.

As distressing as all that is, Alice Jones is optimistic.  She’s nearly completed her General Equivalency Degree (GED), which will give her a high school diploma.  And she has her own apartment.

Jones moved in with her mother early in 2007 after she couldn’t afford to live on her own.  But after a year, she was able to rent a three-bedroom, third-floor apartment in one of Anawim Housing’s buildings.  She took possession in March.

“My children deserved their own rooms,” she says.

But it was not smooth sailing.  She was late on her rent, so she worked out a payment plan with Anawim. “They know I’m trying,” she says.

“I love it here.  I don’t want to move,” she adds.

Anawim staffers also have faith that Jones will be able to make it.  She is one of the first recipients of rent assistance from the Sister Stella Neill Rental Relief Fund, which was established upon successful completion of the “Home is Everything” capital campaign.  The fund, named in honor of Anawim’s executive director, is to be used to assist those families who have financial needs.

Alice Jones and her two children fit the template. Her goal is to use the assistance from the Sister Stella fund as a springboard for better things.

 

Pashion Muhammad has been setting an example for others

While raising five children, she gets her financial house in order, buys own home

It’s because of people like Pashion Muhammad that the staff at Anawim Housing is willing to take a chance with Alice Jones.  They’ve seen what a woman in bad financial straits can do if given an opportunity to find affordagle housing, then stabilize her finances and her family.

Pashion Muhammad did it, and she had as many, if not more, strikes against her than Alice Jones,
Like Jones, Muhammad is 30.  But instead of just entering an Anawim home, she has lived in different Anawim units and in the last year bought her own home for herself and her five children. A few years ago, few would have given her the chance.

Muhammad, a stay-at-home mom at the time, lived with her husband and four children in the Homes of Oakridge before they moved into an Anawim house on Sixth Avenue in 2002.  That was shortly after Muhammad learned that bills weren’t being paid, including the rent.

“They were going to evict us,” she says. “We were $2,000 behind in our rent payments.” Money Muhammad was saving to use as a down payment on a house went to pay the back rent.

“I said to the people at Anawim, ‘Give me a chance. Give me a unit I can afford.’ And they did.  Then I got a job working at a grocery store, enough to pay the rent.”

The Muhammads separated, later divorced after 11 years of marriage, and Pashion took what were then their five children and moved into a Anawim apartment.  She later moved her famil,y into an Anawim duplex.

In the meantime, she took a job at Wells Fargo Bank “and things kept getting better,” she says.  “I made all my rent payments on time-actually a month and a half in advance-and paid back Anawim for damages in the first place we lived. I built back their trust.”

At the same time, the determined and dedicated North High School graduate “repaired my credit. I had really bad credit when I was married.”

She did a good enough job of that that she was able to secure a loan from Bankers Trust Co. to buy from Home, Inc., the four-bedroom, two-bath home in which she now lives.  The woman who “always wanted a place for my children” took possession last December.

Today, she is working full-time at Visiting Nurse Services as a patient educator in training, works two weekends a month as a youth specialist at the Iowa Homeless Youth Center and takes three classes at Des Moines Area community College, as well as parenting her five children ranging in age from 5 to 13.

She gives Anawim, a place she calls “a stepping stone, a place where families can get together, then move on and give your spot to someone who needs it more than you do,: a lot of credit for her success.
“They gave me a chance when nobody else would have.”

Now Anawim is giving that same chance to Alice Jones.

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