Help a Teacher Find Stability and Security

Help Usher Me Across the Threshold

Sweet friends,

I must confess myself embarrassed to stand before you with this request today. I need your help in securing a place I’ve found to live. Specifically, I’m trying to raise the money for first month’s rent and security deposit for a one bedroom apartment by midday Monday, February 24.

Adrift on the seas of the housing crisis

I had to leave my last place at the beginning of July of 2024. As a tenant at will, I had little recourse when my landlady wanted to renovate that apartment. She doubled the rent thereafter.

This setback followed not being renewed at the college where I had been teaching. They were only going to offer me one class anyway, with a capacity raised 50% over where it had been. This was effectively teaching in one course the same number of students I had taught in two courses in Spring 2024. In the end, I was not offered even that course. But my personal version of the housing crisis complicated my search for other teaching opportunities. Even now there are opportunities I have been unable to pursue because of my housing search.

Since July, then, I have been relying on the generosity of friends, who’ve loaned spare bedrooms. Afterwards, since the beginning of October, I’ve been renting space in an otherwise empty house, on the market to be sold. I’d never really been able to move in there, and it hasn’t been comfortable. It has felt so precarious. I think I put up one Christmas decoration. I had to leave that place yesterday.

The search intensifies

I have been looking for my own place for months, and intensively since the beginning of the year. Maine now suffers the same escalation in rent seen throughout the Northeast, and availability is extremely limited. Everyone has a separate application fee.

A breakthrough

But yesterday, I received the very good news that final approval for the most active and attractive prospect is all but approved. It’s likely to be mine by Monday, provided I can pull a post–Christmas George Bailey and raise these needed funds.

This place is small, but clean and mighty. It’s a short walk downtown, and accessible by highway to both of my jobs. I have some work friends who live in the area. They’ve joked about finding a way to get me to stay in that town. The rent is only $100 more than where I’d lived until July, but all utilities are covered.

The alternative

Many times over the past eight months, and more frequently over the past month, I’ve contemplated what it would be like to be unhoused, and how easy it is to become so. Frustrated with the pace of the application process, one property manager recommended places with emergency housing. I was taken aback. My mind kept returning to the story of a veteran whose medical bills sent him “couch surfing” until the day a reporter at a free food event stuck a camera in his face and asked him what it was like to be unhoused. As of yesterday, I had no fixed address.

Your help multiplies

I work two jobs, one of which affords me health care, and the other of which may afford a future more like the one I had envisioned, teaching in some form. I feel my contributions are valued in each space. I’ve been clawing dignity from circumstance.

Your generosity can help cement that before which I am now poised.

“Many hands make light work,” goes the adage, and every contribution can help provide me the security to contribute to my workplaces and community.

Your generosity would help turn things around for me. Already I feel a peaceableness, a relief at the prospect of a platform stable enough for me to continue my paths of my vocation of teaching, and avocation of healthy living.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my case at this critical juncture. My takeaway is that even the smallest assistance you can offer can help change the tide for me, and the others to whom I devote service.