The State Emergency Relief Program supports people facing a crisis with overdue utility bills, home repairs, and burial expenses.
For the first time since 2020, the funding has been depleted early, leaving thousands of households without support for the next several months.
Dwayne Haywood manages the program for the state health department.
He says in recent years Michigan has used federal pandemic relief funds to meet the increasing demand for assistance.
“We are looking internally at strategies that we can we can deploy that would give us an opportunity to at least get us through a portion…and when I say a portion of the season..the hard hit which is the crisis and most likely in the winter months.”
This year, more than 180,000 households received financial assistance from the State Emergency Relief Program. The average payment was around $358 dollars.
