Dunagan Family Eviction

Hi my name is Erin Dunagan and I’m hoping to raise enough money to keep my family from being evicted on 10/20/23 and losing the first place we’ve felt safe in 8 years. Our family is myself, my husband Nick, and our two beautiful boys Phoenix and Theodore. We are hoping to raise $3,000, which will go immediately to paying off our back rent and utilities, with any potential extra funding going towards getting the kids new clothes for the upcoming winter.

Both of my children have learning disabilities and the youngest is on the Autism spectrum. Life in our previous home was very hard for them, and they’re only just starting to finally get used to the idea that this is home now and they’re safe. The resources in this town are much better for both of them and they are finally thriving both at home and in school. We are finally living in a place where we feel safe and have begun to heal from the mental, physical and emotional problems caused by our previous rental.

Unfortunately our trade off for a safer place to live is that our monthly rent jumped from $325 to $925. My husband is the only member of our household working at this time. My husband had a well paying job in our previous town, but had to quit because it was to far from our apartment, and spent over a month putting applications in for everywhere and anything he could before he got a position at a local grocery store. He makes enough that we can stay on top of bills, but not enough to have any savings or pay down any debt. I had a job before our children were born but had to quit once I realized that our children would need extra care and that we were spending more than I made on childcare costs and now I’m having extreme difficulty finding a job for the first time in 8 years.

This brings us to the problem at hand, which is that we had to spend the better part of August and September with close to no income. Our landlord has served us with a tentative eviction notice that says we have to pay $2,610 dollars by 10/20/2023 or we will be forced to leave. We have been calling and visiting local government offices, charities, and churches trying to find rental assistance but in our area the funding is gone before it even gets there and the waiting lists are longer than we have time to wait.

We have spent the past 8 years until the end of July this year living in horrible conditions in a falling apart mobile home in a tiny town not far from where we currently live. The floor and ceilings were collapsing in places, there were constant interruptions in the water and electricity, it shook in the gentlest of thunderstorms and had no heating or air conditioning. We were renting it from a landlord that refused to repair anything and we had to learn to fix everything including plumbing, but we stayed there because it’s what we could afford. The previous landlord suffered an unfortunate accident and his son took over operations including our mobile home, and decided to evict us, so this will be the second time in less than 3 months that we’ve been homeless.

If we lose this apartment I’m confident that it will take years to get back to stable life and we will likely be homeless for a long time before we get to a point where we have enough money to get a new place to live. Even if we reach a partial goal it will make earning the rest of the money possible.