TRAVERSE CITY — Wolverine Cabinet Company announced a $200,000 gift to fund Goodwill Northern Michigan’s work in Permanent Supportive Housing.
This marked the founding of the Building Hope Alliance, an initiative with Goodwill Northern Michigan that “calls on the building trades to help address homelessness and housing instability,” according to a media release.
The gift was also in celebration of Wolverine’s 20th anniversary, and its showroom’s 10th year in Traverse City.
The cabinet company will cover the cost of Goodwill’s hiring, onboarding, training, salary, and benefits for a housing-based case manager for the next three years, they said.
Specifically, it will help fund in-home supports at the recently rehabilitated, 64-unit supportive housing complex East Bay Flats.
“We help to build beautiful homes and are a key part of that industry,” Wolverine part-owner Sean O’Connor said. “Yet there are so many people in our community for whom that is just a dream.”
O’Connor said Wolverine’s founding gift is a way to give back to those who are experiencing housing insecurity.
“It seemed like a natural fit.”
Nora Dunlop, Goodwill Northern Michigan’s director of housing development, said housing-based case managers are an integral component of permanent supportive housing, alongside the units themselves, and the subsidies that keep those units affordable.
“The case management piece is really important,” Dunlop said. “And those positions are hard work.”
Case managers work with individuals when they leave homelessness to enter into housing.
They help their clients achieve personal goals, “always through the goal of housing stability,” Dunlop said.
“For some, maybe that’s increasing their income or getting a job,” she said. “For others, maybe it’s getting on social security disability, finding a primary care doctor, or finding a church community.”
O’Connor said that, as he researched ways to give back to the community, it became clear that supporting Goodwill’s work was the right move.
“They know where the needs are,” he said.
O’Connor’s wife, Cathy, is president and CEO of local nonprofit Step Up Northern Michigan.
After they met with Dunlop and a case manager at East Bay Flats “to really see what they do on a day-to-day basis,” O’Connor said their decision was cinched.
“We asked Goodwill what it would take to hire, train, and underwrite a case manager for three years,” O’Connor said. “They came back with a very detailed report.”
The total came to slightly more than $200,000.
“We were able to hire a new case manager at East Bay Flats,” Dunlop said. “It’s huge. We know that this is what works, so having the funding to support this is really helpful.”
During an event hosted at Wolverine’s Cass Street showroom this week, Wolverine and Goodwill encouraged other regional builders to join the Building Hope Alliance.
“Our hope is that this will snowball into a larger investment from those in the building trades to support the same initiative,” O’Connor said. “There are a lot of other builders and contractors in the trades who have also been blessed in this community. Our hope is that we can set an example and bring other companies to give back in this way.
“It’s ideal to be able to help those who are experiencing housing insecurity when we are making our living building and finishing beautiful homes ourselves.”
Northern Michigan Supportive Housing and the Northern Michigan Community Action Agency are, along with Goodwill Northern Michigan, part of the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness.
All three of those entities employ housing-based case management.
Dunlop said NMSH and NMCAA are also seeking funding.
“We are so grateful for Wolverine’s support,” she said. “Goodwill is certainly expanding what we are doing, but we’re not the only game in town. It will take a community approach to really end homelessness here; to keep it rare, brief, and one time.”
Dunlop said Wolverine’s gift offers “a sense of stability as we allow others to seek stability in their housing.”