A Tucson nonprofit that has provided affordable housing for more than 50 years launched a Workforce Development Center over the summer to help residents and community members build careers and financial independence.

TMM Family Services was founded in 1974 by Tucson Methodist churches with an initial focus on foster care. It eventually expanded its efforts to include a thrift shop, real estate acquisitions and affordable housing. Its main campus hosts 80 units, with plans for further expansion.

TMM also supports clients with employment education, describing its mission as helping families move from crisis to stability and from survival to independence by offering housing, guidance and support to rebuild their lives.

“Part of securing that stability is creating the wraparound services that help eliminate the barriers that prevent someone from having stability in their housing,” CEO Christie Lee told Tucson Spotlight. ”One of those areas is critically their abilities to work and their workforce and their opportunities to gain meaningful employment and to grow within that employment, whether it's a certification or a degree or just learning how to ask for a raise or how to ask for a promotion when they're deserving of that.”

Workforce and housing stability have to go hand in hand, Lee said.

“You can't have one without the other," she said.

TMM recently launched a Workforce Development Center, funded by an anonymous donor, to address those needs and help residents and community members build career skills and financial stability.

The center occupies buildings that had sat unused since 2018, when the state pulled funding for foster care housing on TMM's campus. Lee, a former commercial real estate lender, partnered with the Arizona Builders Alliance on a two-year renovation that turned a former children's assessment center into a community conference room, an old apartment used for laundry into a full laundry facility, and a children's learning center into a senior and veteran center.

Rather than build new programming from scratch, TMM is working to bring in outside nonprofits to teach on site.

“How can I say I'm going to do this program better than you when they're the expert? I can fast track and be much more effective to the people that need the programming if I bring in the people that already know how to do it,” Lee said. “(The idea is) creating partnerships within the community to bring their programming and services on site to the buildings that we've renovated.”

Lee said bringing outside programs onto TMM's campus does double duty: it gives residents direct access to services, while giving those partner organizations' clients a reason to visit campus and, ideally, apply for housing themselves.

“That's what we're really all about,” she said. “Kind of a hand up in lieu of a hand out.”

The partnerships will be formalized through memorandums of understanding, Lee said, with grant funding supporting both organizations' costs, including office space on TMM's campus.

“When we're done with our MOU agreements, there is a big conglomerate of us,” Lee said. “I hope that it will be another pilot that shows the community this is how you do it.”

TMM is also looking for volunteers to teach classes directly, Lee said, alongside the formal nonprofit partnerships.

That collaborative approach is already playing out in the center's programming. Its first program, Pathways to Employment, was a pilot that helped two residents prepare for the job market, including resume writing and interview skills.

Participation was low in that first run, which Lee attributed to the program launching at the start of summer and the challenge of getting people to commit without a stipend. She said turnout should grow as the program continues into the fall.

The second session, an eight-week workshop series called "A Summer Dream: From Idea to Income," taught participants how to turn a skill or passion into a business, covering everything from building a customer base to managing money.

"The workforce development classes helped me build confidence in myself while gaining skills I can actually use in the workplace," according to Heather Thompson, a TMM resident who completed both programs.

Thompson arrived at TMM after leaving a domestic violence situation with her young son, who has cerebral palsy. Lee said she was housed immediately, without waiting on paperwork or a paycheck.

“I said, ‘I don't care. We'll figure that out,’” Lee said. “I know that when somebody has the guts to walk out of a situation like that, to go back and wait for a paycheck, they may never walk back out again.”

Thompson went on to land a part-time position with the University of Arizona as a parent representative, beating out more than 200 other applicants.

She's set to speak Oct. 21 as a panelist at TMM's "Runway to Resilience" fundraising event, which will feature a fashion show and dinner at the Treasury.

Lee said the center reflects TMM's broader mission, giving residents and the community the tools to break the cycle of poverty.

“When you're dealing with somebody that's in a crisis mode, the last thing they have is the energy to pour into doing something better for themselves,” Lee said. “And so sometimes it's as basic as helping them to get to that point to where they can start to receive the help. And that's why there's no one solution for each person. It's all different depending on what stage of crisis they're in.”

Looking ahead, Lee said TMM plans to track the center's impact through concrete outcomes.

“I want to be able to say that our eviction rate went down, that on-time payments went up, that savings rates went up, that FICO scores improved, that earnings improved, that this many people got promotions this year in their jobs,” Lee said.

Christy Russell is a journalism major at the University of Arizona and Tucson Spotlight intern. Contact her at crussell68@arizona.edu.

Caitlin Schmidt is editor and publisher of Tucson Spotlight.

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