Northwest Project’s moving parts making economic headway

With an abundance of moving parts, over 20 organizations and hundreds of Springfield community members stepping in to help, The Northwest Project would appear to be an effort by the city of Springfield to alleviate poverty in its northwest quadrant. But it’s not the city’s, it’s a privately funded effort led by Amy Blansit.

She already has her plate full as The Northwest Project director, owner of The Fairbanks, founder of the Drew Lewis Foundation, professor of kinesiology at Missouri State University and alumnus of Drury University. But with so many community connections, Blansit has created a dream team working toward a common goal.

“I have so much access to social capital,” Blansit said. “That is a thing our families lack the most.”

With a poverty rate in Greene County of 17.7 percent in 2015, Blansit and The Northwest Project aim to reduce the rate by approaching poverty in a new way.

Launched in May 2016, the multilayered project assists families in overcoming 10 obstacles: quality child care; affordable housing; transportation; parenting and financial literacy skills; resolution of criminal background issues; job training; accountability; use of the earned income tax credit; monthly budget management; and affordable health care.

Cohort progress
The project’s reach is part of its effectiveness and part of the reason it gets associated with the city of Springfield’s Zone Blitz, which is an entirely separate effort that also focuses on lessening poverty in northwest Springfield.

“We’re working alongside Zone Blitz; we’re not a component of it,” said Bridget Dierks, Community Foundation of the Ozarks grant program officer.

Here’s how it works: The Northwest Project enrolls one individual from 10 different families for 16 weeks of intensive programming and education. After graduation from the program, the family member continues to work with case managers and volunteers for 18 months. So far, the program has completed one cohort in the Grant Beach neighborhood and another is scheduled to finish Feb. 9.

Blansit said the first two cohorts have served as pilot programs, and they’ve proven their worth. The program enabled cohort members to collectively reduce over $50,000 in debt, and many of the families increased their income, while simultaneously decreasing their dependence on the program.

Over the next year, The Northwest Project plans to launch cohorts in the Robberson, Woodland Heights and Heart of the Westside neighborhoods.

For funding, The Northwest Project received $1.3 million in private funds through CFO, the Stanley and Elaine Ball Foundation, and The Musgrave Foundation.

Blansit said a challenge is evaluating how far the program budget will stretch.

“It sounds like a lot, but you divide that out over five years and you look at over 50,000 people in Springfield living in poverty, per capita. It becomes a very small amount,” she said.

The grant then goes to the organizations that make up The Northwest Project partnership: the Drew Lewis Foundation, Missouri State and Drury universities. Each of the partners has a specific role. The foundation, started in honor of Blansit’s husband who died from cancer in 2013, provides the central location – The Fairbanks – and manages all the programming for the cohorts. MSU serves as the fiscal agent for the program and provides graduate assistants, research and human resources support. Drury offers tax services to the families who are a part of the program and manages the program’s volunteer opportunities through GivePulse.com.

Year 1 assessment
For the city’s part, municipal officials acknowledged the poverty problem in October 2015, namely through the Zone Blitz that resulted in 225 organizations signing on to help. This month, city officials through the Impacting Poverty Commission released a one-year update detailing the poverty status in Springfield. Median household income increased slightly to $32,473 a year in 2016 from $32,333 in 2015 and the unemployment rate dropped from 5.1 percent in 2015 to 4.8 percent in 2016. 

“There are a lot of plates spinning,” Blansit said. “There are so many aspects to poverty, one program isn’t going to fix it. It’s recreating a community of programs that meet the families in their neighborhoods.”

Springfield Community Gardens, which has office space at The Fairbanks, teaches farm-to-table and healthy eating; various banks in the area teach on financial education; and Community Partnership of the Ozarks, Great Circle and MSU teach parenting.

Life360 Church at the Fairbanks is another program. With an office at The Fairbanks, church leaders run Jobs for Life teaching those in the community to attain better jobs, as well as a preschool that employs 15 and provides child care for people going through The Northwest Project cohorts.

Jeremy Hahn, lead pastor of Life360 Fairbanks, said people in poverty often find themselves isolated and a community is one of the biggest resources they lack, not money.

“They don’t have the friends or family that they can call on when they get in trouble or need a ride,” Hahn said. “It’s really about building that sense of community and social capital with one another, so that when people do run into trouble we work together as a community to problem solve and use our resources to help one another.”

In the next four years, Northwest Project plans to work with 120 individuals a year through the cohorts and assist over 480 individuals total. Most are in a family of five, so an estimated 2,400 individuals could be impacted by the program.


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