Profile: Making Homes Healthier and More Energy Efficient in Baltimore

For years, Tarsha Mitchell rushed her oldest child, who suffers from asthma, to the hospital. "We're well known in the emergency room," she says.

But that is changing, thanks to home repairs designed to reduce health and safety hazards in the 104-year-old Baltimore house where Mitchell lives with her husband and four children. The work was done by Safe at Home, a Casey-supported program providing free repairs to the homes of asthma-diagnosed children in Baltimore City.

"They did a lot of work," says Mitchell, whose five-year-old also has asthma. "Since then, we have not had any problems with asthma. It helped keep the dust down, the air clean, and we can open the living room window to air the place out. It's been very helpful."
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Profile: Philadelphia Foreclosure Prevention Program Serves as Model

By fall 2008, Sandra I. Rodriguez was desperate. Unable to keep up with her mortgage payments when her income plummeted after losing her full-time job and taking a part-time one, Rodriguez was braced to lose her three-bedroom Philadelphia house.

"I had two little kids and was pregnant, and I was pretty much one foot outside my house and one foot inside," says Rodriguez, a single parent who now has three sons. "I was so afraid of losing my home."

Thanks to Philadelphia's innovative foreclosure prevention program, however, Rodriguez was able to renegotiate her loan, which lowered her payments and allowed her to keep her home.
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Profile: Advocates Convince Arizona to Use Stimulus Dollars for Child Care

For Michael Hill, the government subsidy that helped him afford child care also helped him get back on track financially after being out of work for ten months. "It was tremendous. That took so much stress off me," says Hill, 32, a single father in Mesa, Arizona, who needed help paying for child care for his four-year-old son Braeden after the job he finally found last spring paid half of what he'd earned before.

"On that salary, there would have been no way to afford child care. It saved me," says Hill. "And Braeden is in a good, safe place." More >>