Outreach coordinator reports rising housing and food needs; trust moving to launch interim rental assistance

Julia O'Neil, outreach and resource coordinator in the Youth and Family Service Office, told trustees the “biggest need that I am seeing is housing and affordable housing” after recent community outreach at the food pantry, senior center and schools.

O'Neil said she tracked July and August casework: 11 families in July and 17 in August sought housing support or faced imminent loss of housing. She described application barriers to RAFT (the state's emergency rental assistance program), noting paperwork, language access, scanning and upload challenges, and older phones or lack of computers. “A lot of times, they will come and meet me either at the library… or they'll come and meet me in the office, and we have a laptop, and we work on it together,” she said. O'Neil added that RAFT’s maximum assistance has decreased from $10,000 to $7,000 and that higher local rents (she cited three‑bedroom rents around $3,500 at some developments) make affordability more difficult for large families.

Trust staff told the board the trust has signed a contract with MetroWest Collaborative Development to administer an emergency rental assistance program that will provide interim rental payments while households apply for RAFT, subsidize part of large rent increases to prevent eviction, and offer partial payments to fill shortfalls. One staff member told trustees that RAFT processing can “take anywhere up to 90 days,” underscoring the need for interim assistance.

Trustees invited O'Neil to participate in program setup, and staff said they will schedule kickoff meetings with MetroWest in the coming weeks and circulate program guidelines, eligibility rules and any maximum award amounts to trustees.