Trisha Young and her family spent two years living in her car on the streets of Phoenix before she discovered Entryway, a non-profit organization that partners with multifamily housing companies to help people struggling with homelessness get new skills, a full-time job in the apartment industry, and a place of their own to call home.
Now, Trisha has a career as a leasing consultant – and she’s one of the stars of a new documentary video that highlights the work Entryway is doing across Arizona and the country.
The emotional eight-minute video – entitled Entryway: Transforming Lives Through Housing and Careers – recounts the stories of Arizonans like Trisha and LaTaevia Huff-Betts, both of whom have overcome tremendous challenges with help from Entryway and its Arizona executive director, Mandy Porter-Griffith.
“A lot of the folks that I’m working with have lost hope, and without hope, you can’t get out of homelessness,” Porter-Griffith says in the video. “There’s so much unseen homelessness. It’s the single mom who is in a bad relationship and wants to leave, but doesn’t feel she has a lot of options. It’s the person sleeping in their car. It’s the person sleeping on their aunt’s couch.”
In Arizona, Entryway works with companies like Greystar, PB Bell, and Maxx Properties to match motivated individuals with entry-level positions in maintenance, leasing, and groundskeeping – jobs that come with both a paycheck and a place to live.
The video captures the hidden struggles of program participants through personal stories. Determined to keep her family together, LaTaevia completed 40 hours of Entryway training on a borrowed Wi-Fi signal from a McDonald’s parking lot. Today, she’s employed, housed, and rebuilding her life.
For Trisha, the program provided not only training and housing but also the belief that she deserved success.
“When I started working at my property … I never felt more welcomed, like I actually had a home,” she said.
As David Williams, Entryway’s President and CEO tells it, Entryway is all about offering a hand up and helping those in need achieve economic self-sufficiency through career training, a job, and housing in partnership with the organization’s housing partners.
“Sixty percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck,” says Williams. “Bumps in the road come along and they find themselves living in their car, living in a shelter. We have special partnerships with the multifamily industry who are looking for entry level employees to help maintain their properties. And at the same time, they have apartment units that are not being used. And so we are a bridge between individuals that are in crisis with an individual that is in crisis.”
You can watch the full video here. And you can learn more about Entryway at their website, https://entrywaytalent.org/. If you’d like to partner with Entryway, contact Kristen Poteet, Vice President of External Affairs, at kpoteet@entrywaytalent.org or 703-634-6130.
