For years, Decatur resident Margaret Schuelke has been working quietly and diligently to make DeKalb County a better place for all its citizens. As director of Project Community Connections Inc., located in Oakhurst, Margaret oversees an organization that connects people with homes. PCCI assists individuals and families experiencing homelessness with permanent housing placements and connections to mainstream resources. What they do is often called “rapid rehousing”—PCCI assumes the task of placing clients into appropriate permanent housing within the community, allowing other service providers to focus on stabilizing clients with case management.

Later this week, Margaret will travel to the nation’s capital to be honored in a ceremony at the White House as a “Champion of Change in the Fight Against Youth Homelessness.” She is one of only thirteen honorees in the nation. Each week, the White House recognizes a different group of Americans who are making positive change in their communities. This week, the focus is on youth homelessness. At this event, representatives from the US Interagency Council on Homelessness and various White House officials will participate in a discussion with the Champions to hear about their efforts to serve some of our most vulnerable neighbors in their struggle with homelessness. Her story will also be featured on the White House website.

In 2010, Margaret and some colleagues in other agencies found themselves improvising:  in response to an urgent phone call, PCCI and several other organizations came together to serve a family that needed immediate shelter, employment, educational support services, and housing search and rental assistance. They successfully worked together to help the family.

The situation clearly illuminated the ways an increasingly challenging economic environment was landing more families with children on the streets or in highly unstable housing environments. Homelessness, they knew, means more than just living without shelter of one’s own. In a family, it can weave a tangled web of difficulties around a child’s access to education, a parent’s involvement in a child’s schooling, the emotional health of a child, and even a parent’s access to work.

So with Margaret’s leadership, the group began to seek new, creative ways of addressing the complex problems of homelessness, leading to the formation of the DeKalb KidsHome Collaborative. With a two-year seed grant, four agencies—PCCI, Decatur Cooperative Ministry, DeKalb County Public Schools Foundation’s School Social Work Department/Homeless Program, and First Step Staffing—came together to build a holistic system of support for stable housing, work, and schooling.

Each collaborator brings its unique expertise to the table: homelessness prevention and emergency and transitional shelter; connecting families in need with safe, affordable, and permanent housing; resources to help students who have experienced homelessness or near-homelessness reach their full educational potential; and job placement.

The KidsHome Collaborative has succeeded and thrived, attracting still more funding and national recognition in its two years so far. More importantly, as of this spring, it had helped stabilize the lives of nineteen families with children who attend DeKalb County Schools—that’s 72 people, including 24 adults and 48 children.

Before PCCI, Margaret also served the community in roles at Progressive Redevelopment, Inc., the Atlanta YWCA, the DeKalb County Police Department, and Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership. She has a B.A. from Georgia State University and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Georgia. She and her daughter are active members of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church.

Congratulations to Margaret Schuelke!