While Montgomery County has a reputation for affluence, more than 76,100 residents of our county live on incomes below the Federal Poverty Line. It costs about $135,500 a year for a family with two working parents and two children to afford necessities without subsidies.  (Source: Glasmeier, Amy K. Living Wage Calculator. 2024. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/24031.) That covers just the basics: no birthday presents, no occasional treat at a fast food restaurant, and no financial cushion to cover things like your car needing a new tire.

Helping these neighbors is the mission of Interfaith Works (IW), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that serves people experiencing poverty and homelessness through emergency shelter, supportive housing, essential needs, and employment programs. IW serves 35,000 residents of Montgomery County every year. There are concerning trends in our community. An annual snapshot of people experiencing homelessness conducted in 2024 found a significant increase in homelessness from 2023 to 2024. There was a 28% increase, from 894 to 1,144 people. To put this in the state context, Montgomery County accounts for nearly 20% of the people who are experiencing homelessness in Maryland.

Those doing the survey also reported seeing more people experiencing homelessness in communities that are atypical, including Potomac and North Bethesda.

 WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?  
There are numerous factors contributing to this increase, including:  

• the lack of affordable housing in the Montgomery County;  
• continually increasing rents;  
• inflation;  
• denial of housing applications due to criminal or credit history;  
• source-of-income discrimination by landlords;  
• increased evictions;  
• dwindling eligibility for federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program funds; and  
• the significant inflow of unhoused individuals into the County from other jurisdictions. 

Homelessness is something that happens for a wide array of reasons. These include:

• loss of job;
• loss of spouse;
• the need to flee an abusive spouse or partner;
• sudden illness;
• chronic illness or disability that limits the person’s ability to hold down a job;
• traumatic experiences with behavioral health impacts;
• overwhelming health care debt;
• involvement in the legal/criminal justice system that limits ability to find employment and/or housing;
• rents that are outpacing wages;
• and a rental system that that doesn’t protect renters adequately, leaving them vulnerable to sudden evictions with limited due process.  

Because of the high cost of living in Montgomery County, people are getting by on very thin margins. One client, a bus driver, missed a couple days of work simply because his normal shift fell on two holidays, so he went unpaid. As a result, he was unable to make rent that month.
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Interfaith Works is among several service providers in Montgomery County that are committed to making the experience of homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. A first step can be providing emergency shelter to stabilize an individual’s situation and then working with them to pursue their personal goals and move toward more permanent housing. Montgomery County’s Rapid Rehousing Program, a successful effort in which IW participates, seeks to move people out of the shelter environment as soon as they are able and into stable housing options.   

Another effective strategy is providing prevention programs, so individuals and families never experience homelessness or instability in the first place. IW has two such programs. IW Connections provides our neighbors with emergency financial assistance to help them pay back rent, potentially avoiding eviction, and pay overdue utility bills so they do not suffer in the cold or heat.

The IW Vocational Services Program (VSP) also provides a crucial prevention lifeline, helping people become job-ready as well as seek and land jobs. In addition to providing resume and interviewing assistance, VSP’s Paid Training Program helps people find training and pays the registration costs as well as a stipend for every hour they are in training so they don’t lose income. With this support, the completion rate for training programs shot up to over 90%.  Those placed in jobs last year earned an average hourly wage of $18.53.

And beyond helping put people back to work, VSP is a critical economic engine for our community. Over the past five years, VSP clients – Montgomery County residents – collectively earned annual starting salaries totaling $12.5 million. That is money flowing back into our economy through taxes and buying power.

What can you do? Consider becoming a partner with Interfaith Works. There are many opportunities to be part of the solution by volunteering and supporting this important work through in-kind donations and if you would like to learn more about opportunities at Interfaith Works, please contact Julian Peters at [email protected].

​ 

Maryland's pitch to fired federal workers: Come work for the state Gov. Wes Moore announced resources for people looking for new jobs.
 
By Katie Shepherd and Katie Mettler
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) on Friday announced new resources for federal workers who lose their jobs, including an effort to recruit them to state jobs, amid Trump administration cuts that could leave more than 10,000 Marylanders out of work.
"This is not patriotism," Moore said, referring to the firing of thousands of federal workers in recent weeks. "This is cruelty."
Standing in Annapolis with other state leaders and a federal worker who lost his job with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Feb. 18, the governor pitched several paths for federal employees who may be looking for work.
Those civil servants could come work for the state of Maryland, which has about 250 job postings and about 5,200 vacancies overall. They could join a pilot program, soon to be created by the state Transportation Department, that would help translate their public service work experience to state jobs across several state agencies.
Individuals could seek a teaching certification and take on a second career as an educator, Moore said. This would be a boon to a state that needs 12,000 to 15,000 more teachers to meet its ambitious goals to overhaul education.
The state will host virtual and in-person job fairs in Prince George's County and Baltimore, Moore said. A newly launched website points unemployed Marylanders to resources, including more than 130,000 job openings across the state. Moore also ordered the Maryland Department of Budget and Management to streamline the state job-application process so applications could be considered quickly.
The governor's announcement Friday aims to fix two pervasive challenges facing Maryland: a high vacancy rate in the state workforce and a looming unemployment crisis for federal workers caught up in President Donald Trump's mass layoffs.
In October 2022, the year Moore was elected, nearly 6,500 state jobs were vacant, according to an analysis from the state Department of Budget and Management. One of Moore's primary campaign promises was to rebuild the state workforce, which had shrunk under the administration of Gov. Larry Hogan (R). AB of January 2025, the vacancy rate had fallen to 5,222, even as the Moore administration added more jobs to the overall workforce.
In a statement, AFSCME Maryland, the union that represents state employees, said it supported the governor's effort to recruit laid-off federal employees into state jobs. The union called on the state to "fully fund" the state's hiring process, which has been criticized for moving too slow.
Moore's plan mirrors similar efforts in other states, including Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) this week touted a website advertising job openings even as he defended Trump's workforce cuts. Democratic governors in Hawaii, New York and New Mexico are also trying to recruit former federal workers to their states.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) joined Moore on Friday and voiced his support for former federal workers who are waiting to see whether federal courts will intervene to reverse or stop their terminations. Van Hollen said the firings were bound to disrupt services that Americans count on, and often don't even realize the government is doing, until a crisis occurs.
"Until something goes wrong, people don't realize the good work that's being done," Van Hollen said. "But I'll tell you, when that good work stops, things will go wrong."