Family Promise of Hawaii Launches Housing Scholarships as Family Homelessness Rises 21 Percent

Family Promise of Hawaii has launched a Housing Scholarships program that pairs temporary rental subsidies with case management, an effort to help families who are homeless or on the edge of it not just get housed but stay housed after the assistance ends, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported October 17.

The program, launched Thursday, arrives in response to growing demand: Family Promise now receives more than 150 inquiries each month from families contacting the organization for the first time, Executive Director Ryan Catalani said. It also lands against a troubling trend line. Hawaii has seen a 21 percent increase in family homelessness since 2022, according to the state's point-in-time count, with families with children making up a growing share of the state's homeless population even as other parts of the response system show progress.

The economics of Hawaii's housing market give that instability its particular shape. The state consistently ranks among the most expensive in the country for both rents and home prices, and Honolulu's rental market leaves little slack for households earning near median wages, let alone below them. For families living one car repair or one reduced workweek from a missed rent payment, the distance between housed and homeless can be a single bad month, the dynamic Catalani described in the Star-Advertiser interview.

Many of the families seeking help are not unemployed. They have jobs and income, Catalani told the Star-Advertiser, but their earnings do not cover housing and the rest of a household budget in a state with some of the nation's highest living costs. A health issue, reduced hours, a lost job or caregiving responsibilities can destabilize a family that was getting by.

"It's just not enough," Catalani said of the income many families bring in, particularly when combined with other expenses and the current cost of housing.

A SCHOLARSHIP MODEL, NOT A CHECK

The program's name is a deliberate frame. Catalani compared the concept to an educational scholarship, which provides financial support while investing in a person's longer-term growth and opportunities. Traditional rental assistance can carry stigma for some recipients, he said; the scholarship model is meant to encourage families to view the support as an investment in their future rather than simply a temporary subsidy.

The mechanics combine a housing subsidy with case management tailored to each family. Subsidies are paid directly to landlords and can either stabilize a family's current housing or help secure a new home if the family is already experiencing homelessness. The amount and duration of assistance depend on individual circumstances, with three general support periods: up to three months, three to 12 months, and 12 months or longer.

While receiving the subsidy, families work with case managers to assess needs and identify strengths across employment, finances, housing, health and education. Depending on that assessment, support can include building a household budget, understanding credit scores, increasing income, accessing workforce training or finding better-paying work, along with connections to transportation assistance, childcare, health care and mental health services.

BUILT AROUND THE EXIT

The program's design is organized around the moment the subsidy ends. Catalani said the goal is to use the period of financial assistance to prepare families for the time when they will no longer receive it. Families are encouraged, when financially feasible, to set aside some of the income they would otherwise spend on housing while receiving assistance, building savings and stronger financial habits before the support tapers off.

The direct-to-landlord payment design serves that purpose. Assistance flowing straight to the property owner removes the risk that a crisis-stressed family loses the subsidy to another emergency before the rent is paid, and it gives landlords a reliable counterparty, which can matter when a family with a recent housing crisis applies for a new lease. For families staying in place, the same payment structure stabilizes the existing tenancy without requiring a move, according to the program description reported by the Star-Advertiser.

The stakes for children run through the whole model. Family homelessness disrupts school attendance, health care and the routines that child development depends on, which is why the program's case management extends into education and health alongside finances and employment, and why the eligibility door opens to grandparents raising grandchildren and parents working toward reunification with their children.

The aim is a transition into permanent housing the family can sustain independently, rather than a cycle of returning for help. Catalani said repeat requests for assistance are relatively uncommon among the families the organization can track, though he acknowledged a household can become vulnerable again if its financial circumstances change.

That graduation logic distinguishes the model from pure emergency assistance. Emergency rent help resolves the crisis in front of a family; the scholarship structure tries to change the family's position before the next crisis arrives, using the subsidy period as a working window rather than a pause.

A DELIBERATELY BROAD DOOR

Eligibility is drawn wider than many federal program definitions. The Housing Scholarships program is intended to serve two-parent families with children, single pregnant women, multigenerational families, grandparents raising grandchildren and parents working to reunify with their children. It also explicitly includes families who are temporarily staying with friends or relatives because they have nowhere else to go, even if they do not meet every formal definition of homelessness.

That last category matters in Hawaii, where doubled-up living is a common response to housing costs and where families in that situation are often invisible to programs keyed to narrow statutory definitions. Rather than requiring families to navigate different program definitions and eligibility rules on their own, Family Promise intends to assess each household's circumstances and match it with appropriate funding, according to the Star-Advertiser's reporting.

PREVENTION AGAINST A COSTLY ALTERNATIVE

The program's emphasis on keeping families housed, or moving them quickly back into housing, reflects a calculation that homeless services systems have increasingly formalized: preventing a family's homelessness, or shortening it, costs less and harms less than sheltering the same family through a long spell of instability. Shelter stays for families are expensive to operate, disruptive to children and hard to exit the longer they last. A well-timed subsidy plus case management aims to intercept families before that trajectory starts.

Family Promise of Hawaii operates within a national Family Promise network that has long specialized in family homelessness, but the scholarship framing is its own local design choice, one that treats the language of assistance as part of the intervention. If families engage with the program as an investment to manage rather than a benefit to receive, the organization's theory goes, they are more likely to use the subsidy window to change their financial position, according to Catalani's explanation in the Star-Advertiser.

CONSOLIDATING A PATCHWORK

The launch also reorganizes Family Promise's own assistance landscape. The organization plans to transition most of its existing time-limited rental assistance programs into the Housing Scholarships model, creating a more consistent approach while continuing to follow the restrictions attached to individual grants and funding sources.

That consolidation addresses a problem familiar to social service providers: families with similar needs can receive very different help depending on which funding stream they happen to enter, and staff time goes to managing program boundaries rather than serving households. A single framework with matched funding behind it simplifies the front door even where the money underneath remains restricted.

Whether the model scales to the need is the open question. The program consolidates funding streams the organization already administers rather than arriving with a single large new appropriation, which means its reach will depend on how far those combined resources stretch across a caseload that is still growing. The three-tier duration structure gives case managers flexibility to spend deeper on the families with the furthest to go, but it also means the hardest cases absorb the most resources by design, according to the program description.

Catalani's point-in-time figure also carries a methodological caveat that matters for how the trend is read: the count is a snapshot taken on a single night, and family homelessness in Hawaii often takes forms, doubled-up households, families cycling through short-term arrangements, that a one-night count can understate. The program's broad eligibility door is built for exactly those families, the ones who may not appear in any official tally but are one setback from the street, according to the Star-Advertiser's reporting.

THE DEMAND SIGNAL

The 150-plus first-time inquiries arriving each month are the program's clearest justification, and its biggest operational challenge. Every element of the model, individualized assessment, tiered assistance duration, case management across employment and health, is more labor-intensive than cutting a one-time check. Serving a growing queue of families at that depth requires the organization to scale case management capacity alongside the subsidy dollars.

The 21 percent rise in family homelessness since 2022 gives the effort its urgency. Hawaii's overall homelessness response has made progress in other areas, but families with children have moved in the wrong direction for four years, a trend Catalani's organization is now built to confront with a model that treats a housing subsidy as the beginning of stabilization rather than the whole of it, according to the Star-Advertiser's reporting.