Molina Healthcare of Wisconsin partnered with Mercy Housing Lakefront to help residents at a critical time.

Mercy Housing Lakefront (MHL) greatly appreciates Molina Healthcare of Wisconsin in 2021 for providing additional emergency rental support to Wisconsin residents. Molina granted Mercy Housing Lakefront $12,000 to support 12 Milwaukee families in need of additional rental support in January 2021.

Residents of MHL’s communities pay an affordable portion of their income toward rent, and some receive rental subsidies which can be adjusted to cover a higher portion of the rent when residents lose income. However, many residents, and especially working families with children, have experienced loss of income as a result of the pandemic in the past year. For residents living in affordable communities without subsidies, that loss of income has impacted their ability to pay rent. Wisconsin communities that house working families such as Greenwich Park Apartments and McAuley Apartments have been especially impacted by this problem.

Across communities, MHL has collected rent forbearance forms from residents — reporting changes in their incomes and employment that could impact their abilities to pay rent — and an administrative team (separate from onsite staff) reviewed and approved assistance requests for residents who had suffered a loss of income at such a difficult time.

Rental support assisted five new or expecting mothers at St. Catherine Residence, six families at Greenwich Park Apartments, and two families at McAuley Apartments.

At St. Catherine’s, support was directed to the Safe Home Environment (SHE) program, a partnership with Aurora Health Care that provides up to six pregnant and postpartum women at a time with a safe, affordable, and supportive home where their babies learn and grow during their first 18 months of life, while the mothers develop greater parenting skills and increased economic self-sufficiency.

Aurora Health Care, which operates an evidence-based Safe Mom Safe Baby program for abused women who are pregnant, directly refers young mothers fleeing domestic violence to safe, affordable housing at SCR while continuing to provide specialized services. Participants receive subsidized rent at a rate of $240/month per participant, with support from individual supporters and institutional partners. In 2020, eight women and their babies participated in the SHE program. Recently, the program needed additional support for subsidies, and Molina’s grant assisted five families participating in the program, covering the subsidies needed for part of November as well as December 2020.

At Greenwich Park and McAuley, emergency rental assistance was provided to cover over a month of rent for each of the families who qualified for the assistance at these two communities. MHL greatly appreciates this support for Wisconsin residents.

“As the pandemic stretches on, many of the low-income families we serve struggle to make ends meet through no fault of their own,” said Mark Angelini, President of Mercy Housing Lakefront. “We are grateful to Molina for this donation and appreciate their ongoing efforts and generosity to support families who have been financially challenged by the COVID-19 crisis.”