By Abby Boshard, Photo: photoBeard/Shutterstock, Housing Matters, April 5, 2023
Deanna Creighton Cook and Serge Martinez had a problem. They knew that rental assistance and legal services could prevent eviction for families in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but their initial efforts weren’t identifying families early enough in the quick eviction process for assistance to make a difference. So they used their backgrounds in tenant legal assistance and community school services and pivoted to a new strategy.
“We had a eureka moment when we noticed the extreme overlap between areas of high eviction rates and high school mobility—that is, students leaving schools during the school year. We know that mobility has a seriously deleterious effect on student achievement—for individual students and, less intuitively, their classrooms and their entire schools—and so we thought that reducing evictions could lower mobility in some of our county's poorest schools,”
- Martinez and Creighton Cook
Out of this idea, they developed Amparo, a nonprofit funded through private donations and philanthropic grants that provides rental assistance to prevent homelessness among families with school-age children. Community school coordinators in the ABC Community School network or McKinney-Vento school staff members vet and submit relief requests to Amparo, allowing assistance to reach families faster. These services especially help students from families with low incomes and students learning English.
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