COMPASS for kids

In the spring of 2008, Jodi Wilinsky Hill, Ed.M’82, stood in the cafeteria of Middlesex Community College with a young homeless Dominican mother, who asked her the most gripping question: How did you know to go to college?

What seemed like such a simple question was convoluted at best. “She was an abused kid but trying to figure out how people do better,” Hill says. “She was smart, attractive, thoughtful, and couldn’t figure out how to do better than what she was doing.”

As executive director of COMPASS for kids (@COMPASSforkids), a nonprofit based in Lexington, Massachusetts, Hill has spent the past 22 years working to build the capacity of adults who are central in the lives of underserved children. While the organization she started initially focused on providing parenting education programs and resources, over the years it has become a top professional development training provider for preschool and afterschool educators in Massachusetts, and in the past decade, a central provider of workplace development for homeless families.

“COMPASS doesn’t work directly with kids. We have found the most effective way to support homeless families is to improve their economic situation,” Hill says. “We work to build the capacity of parents to get them to work so they can help support their families, if not fully support their families.”

“We work to build the capacity of parents to get them to work so they can help support their families, if not fully support their families.”

In Massachusetts, family homelessness is a problem with approximately 2,500 families living in traditional homeless shelters and another 2,000 families living in motels. Even within five miles of the COMPASS corporate office in Lexington — an affluent suburban community northwest of Boston — there are 250 families living in motels, she points out.

With an average income of $5,000 to $6,000 a year for a family of three or four, it is difficult for homeless families to afford clothing, health expenses, education, and a place to live. As a result, families often move, impacting children who repeatedly move from one school system to another. Homeless children often struggle with poor nutrition and resulting health, behavioral, and mental health issues. Even homeless families in shelters or motels struggle with issues regarding limited space, transportation, and access to grocery stores.

The most common situation Hill sees are single mothers who come from intergenerational poverty and have histories of abuse. She contends that it’s a myth that many of these homeless adults like living off the system. “No one gets up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to get up this morning and make my family homeless.’ It’s an accident,” she says. Instead, it is a common scenario in which a single mother’s child becomes ill, and without anyone to assist in childcare, she misses work for one or two days. Then she ends up losing her job. The little money she has left often goes to food — not paying the bills — and before you know it, she and her children end up jobless and homeless.

“No one gets up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to get up this morning and make my family homeless.’"

While Hill acknowledges family homelessness is a cross-sector problem that requires housing, welfare, and education to better work together and invest in solving the problem, she uses education as a means to develop and improve their lives. Hill notes that many homeless adults want to work and support themselves but feel struck and struggle with figuring out how to get out of the hole they fell into. This is where COMPASS comes in. Through COMPASS, adults can enroll in a month-long job skills training course, which culminates in a paid internship with one of COMPASS for kids’ employer partners. On average, COMPASS sees 50 new families a year, of which 70 percent graduate the program, 60 percent are hired by their internship site, and 80 to 90 percent earn jobs within three months of finishing the program. COMPASS stays in touch with each participant long-term. And the nonprofit continues to grow. Hill anticipates enrolling up to 100 next year.

Hill, who studied counseling and development and worked as a clinical child abuse specialist in a hospital, never imagined working with this subset of the population. However, every day she still finds herself relying on what she learned at HGSE. “All of the child and adult development courses have become almost a part of my DNA — figuratively,” Hill says. “I tell the people I work with that many homeless parents are developmentally adolescent because their own development was insulted at various points in life. So, you need to work with these parents from that perspective so they can continue to grow.”