Community Meeting Post

For my discussion I chose to talk about the town of Apple Valley providing emergency rental assistance to their residents. This gives qualified residents security deposits, short term rental and/or utility assistance in response to COVID 19. The payments will go directly to the landlord, property company, and/or utility provider on behalf of the eligible resident. The Emergency Rental Assistance is a program that started as an entitlement grantee to the Town of Apple Valley under the Community Development Block Grants Program (CDBG) in which they receive an annual grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to use in the fulfillment of eligible programs. I found out about this topic by looking up the town of apple valley website, once I was on the home page their is a category called “In the Spotlight” and under it is a link titled, “Coronavirus Information” once you click that link it takes you to the latest COVID-19 news from the town showing the newest to the oldest news. THe latest news was about apple valley launching emergency rental assistance, which is the topic I chose to discuss. When watching the message and weekly updates from Apple Valley’s Mayor, Scott Nassif which was located at the middle of the article on apple valley’s new emergency rental assistance program, I noticed the atmosphere of the video was very quiet, it seemed like it was a one on one conversation with me and the mayor as he was alone and in one of the meeting rooms. In the video he showed the recorded coronavirus cases as well as the recorded deaths and recoveries, he also discussed what is locally going on in the city such as allowing restaurants to have outside dine in, gyms and salons to operate outdoors. He also encouraged the community to continue to wear your face mask’s and practice social distancing in order to lower the coronavirus cases and help reopen the community as well as the local coronavirus testing that is going on in the community. Another topic he focused on was a sales tax measure and rather or not they are going to post a sales tax measures on the November voting ballot, this measure asks apple valley citizens voters to consider a 1% sales tax measure to preserve an increase on public safety as well as enhance community services, and address public infrastructure needs, as well as encouraging the community to work on financial strategies that can help their family save money in case of another pandemic. The reason I chose this topic is because having financial issues affects the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and the macrosystem, not only does it affect the parent, but the child, the family as a whole and the community. Parenting implements a series of decisions about the socialization of your child, things like what the parent does to enable the child to become responsible, being a contributing member to society, and what the parent does when they’re angry, cry, lie, aggressive, or don’t do well in school. Therefore, struggling with things like rent and bills can cause your community to see you differently, having a high socioeconomic status means having a high income engaging in highly respected occupations and being well educated. Whereas a low socioeconomic status has low income, unskilled and semiskilled jobs and probably poorly educated. (Berns, 2016, pg.127) “ However, parents with low incomes may have other stressors related to (poverty housing, unsafe neighborhoods, job turnover) that influence their well-being, the tone of their marriage, and the quality of the relationship with their child.” (Berns, 2016, pg. 127) According to several studies, financial hardship experienced by low income families cause anxiety, depression and irritability which then causes the parent to be punitive, incoinsent, authoritarian, and non supportive towards there children. I think the Emergency Rental Assistance is a great move in our community because it causes less stress on families.

References

1. https://www.applevalley.org/Home/Components/News/News/4370/4532 (Links to an external site.)

2. Berns, Roberta. Child, Family, School, Community: Socialization and Support. Cengage Learning, 2016.