Four Pillars EnVision Centers program
Fort Worth Housing Solutions and the city of Fort Worth will be the site for a EnVision Demonstration program, one of 17 sites chosen in the U.S. for the program from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Department.
EnVision Centers will offer HUD-assisted families access to support services that can help them achieve self-sufficiency, thereby making scarce federal resources more readily available to a greater number of households currently waiting to receive HUD assistance.
“We’re honored and thrilled that we’ve been selected by HUD to serve as one of the nation’s new EnVision Centers,” said Mary-Margaret Lemons, president of Fort Worth Housing Solutions. “We’ll now be working closely with the City and our many community partners to begin planning for a center that will successfully support the efforts of low-income families across the region to achieve their self-sufficiency goals.”
HUD Sec. Ben Carson traveled to his hometown of Detroit June 7 to announce the first round of ‘EnVision Center’ designations in 17 communities around the nation.
Fort Worth’s EnVision Center will be located at the Martin Luther King Community Center in East Fort Worth. It will be a centralized hub that serves as an incubator to support four key pillars of self-sufficiency:
Economic Empowerment; Educational Advancement; Health and Wellness; and Character and Leadership.
“Housing assistance should be more than just putting a roof over someone’s head,” said Carson in a HUD news release.. “These EnVision Centers offer a more holistic housing approach by connecting HUD-assisted families with the tools they need to become self-sufficient and to flourish.”
EnVision Centers will leverage public-private partnerships to connect HUD-assisted households with services that offer pathways to self-sufficiency, according to the news release.
After the groundbreaking each demonstration community receiving the EnVision Center designation will meet with their local stakeholders and resident councils to assist in the selection of services to be offered at the center. HUD will develop tools to track and measure resident outcomes of EnVision Center participants and services – the goal of which is to ensure the EnVision Centers are able to achieve and monitor progress.
Last year Carson made a trip to North Texas, visiting the Fort Worth Housing Solutions’ Hunter Plaza Apartments.