In the last couple of decades, Catholic Charities Fort Worth added new services to address client demand. The nonprofit began offering transportation services throughout Tarrant County in 2012. It started a dental clinic in 2013.
However, the organization dedicated to providing pathways out of poverty was still seeing repeat customers, said president and CEO Heather Reynolds.
“What we realized we were doing really well as an organization is when somebody came to our doors, we were helping their poverty not hurt so much. They were hungry, we fed them. They didn’t have transportation, we got it for them,” Reynolds said. “But were things better and different? Not really. We were just making their poverty less painful.”
To tackle poverty at its roots, the Fort Worth nonprofit started Padua, a case management program meant to lift clients out of poverty. Solutions are structured based on the client’s goals, ranging from financial independence to employment stability to housing security.
The program has served 1,089 clients since its inception in 2015. And the success was noted in studies — a 25% increase in likelihood of being employed full time, 64% more likely to have housing and a 46% jump in monthly earnings. That’s according to Patrick Turner, a researcher at University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities.
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