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  Field Notes: Progressive Engagement Activity

  December 19, 2012

  During last summer’s conference, we did an exercise that demonstrates to an audience how a progressive engagement process works. Progressive engagement refers to a strategy of providing a small amount of assistance to everybody who enters your homelessness system, then waiting to see if that works. If it doesn’t, you provide more assistance and wait to see if that works. If not, you apply even more, until eventually you provide your most intensive interventions to the few people who are left.

  We did the exercise with an audience of about 75 people. Here’s how it worked:

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  A Look at the New Homelessness Numbers

  December 18, 2012

  On Monday, December 10, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released national numbers from the January 2012 Point-In-Time (PIT) Counts, which give an estimate of the number of people sleeping in shelters and other housing for homeless people and also in places not meant for human habitation (aka “the streets”) at a single point in time. In this case, that point in time was mid-January, 2012.

  Since a lot of people around the country are entering the final month of preparation for the 2013 PIT count, I want to start by saying that having these numbers every year has turned out to be extremely important. The enumeration is not perfect. But PIT Counts have become more rigorous over the years, and we believe they provide a reliable and worthwhile estimate.

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  The Alliance has a New Blog!

  December 14, 2012

  Attention readers! The Alliance’s blog has been updated. We are currently in the process of transitioning from a Wordpress blog to an integrated blog on our website. The new blog has the same content, but now comes with more bells and whistles to make your experience more interactive. We also now have a favicon, the logo icon that appears when you bookmark our page in your Bookmarks Toolbar. (It's the small touches that matter.)

  The new and permanent location for our blog on our website is here, so please update your bookmarks.

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  Can Veterans Fall Off the Fiscal Cliff?

  December 13, 2012

  As we approach the fiscal cliff, there is a common misperception that, since Congress exempted all programs administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) from sequestration in the Budget Control Act of 2011, programs that assist low-income and homeless veterans are safe from spending cuts.

  That’s not quite true.

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  Field Notes: Talking About Tiers

  December 12, 2012

  Earlier this week, I participated in a webinar with our friends at the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) and Joyce Probst MacAlpine from Dayton/Montgomery County, Ohio about thinking strategically about the NOFA for the the Continuum of Care (CoC) Program.

  The webinar should be posted on USICH’s website in the next few days. In the meantime, it’s worth reiterating and expanding on a few points about the tiering process and how to get the most out of it.

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  Veteran Homelessness Down More than 17 Percent From 2009

  December 11, 2012

  This week the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released some encouraging numbers on veteran homelessness. The number of the homeless veterans recorded during the January 2012 PIT count was 62,619. That's down 7.2 percent from last year’s count.

  That number represents a greater than 17 percent reduction compared to 2009 levels, which means that, even though there are still lot of veterans out there who need our help, we’re making real and significant progress. That’s great news, indeed.

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  Save Money. Register Early!

  December 10, 2012

  The Alliance’s 2013 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness is right around the corner, and we at the Alliance couldn’t be more excited about it. We can’t wait to see you in Seattle for what’s sure to be another successful and productive event!

  The deadline for early registration is fast approaching. If you haven’t registered yet, you should do so as soon as possible as you don’t want to let this great opportunity for significant savings sneak by you.

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  The First Step Toward Ending Youth Homelessness

  December 07, 2012

  Since the implementation of Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, we have made good progress in ending homelessness for veterans and the chronically homeless, and along the way have learned a lot about what works. As we move forward, we want to be sure that preventing and ending homelessness among unaccompanied youth is a priority at both the national and local levels. Getting better data on this population is the first step in making progress towards that goal.

  In the past, HUD’s homeless assistance grants programs defined youth as persons less than 18 years old, and adults as persons 18 years of age and above. We realized, however, that this definition didn't allow us to really understand how many young people are homeless and what their specific needs are.

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  Field Notes: Rapid Re-Housing Outcomes, Community Examples, and Evaluation

  December 06, 2012

  Today we’ve released the fifth and final training module in a five-part training series on rapid re-housing. In this short video, Alliance Capacity Building Associate Kimberly Walker discusses outcomes and evaluations, and provides community examples. When we conduct our rapid re-housing clinics in person, this portion of the training is usually where participants have the most questions and feedback. If you have missed the previous modules, don’t worry, you can find them here.

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  Get in on the Action in Your State Capitol

  December 05, 2012

  With elections nearly a month behind us, advocates are honing strategies to approach leaders and legislatures, new and old. With so much focus on federal budget and policy, it’s easy to overlook that all but half a dozen state legislatures will be in session by the time President Obama is inaugurated for a second term. At that time, state legislators will already be addressing budgetary issues and health care reform, two factors that will play huge roles in homelessness assistance next year.

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  How Assets Can Help the Homeless

  December 04, 2012

  As the founder of the consulting firm Asset Building Strategies (ABS), Heather McCulloch, notes in her primer “Asset Building 101,” “Income enables families to get by. Assets enable them to weather financial crises, invest in their children and their community, plan for a secure retirement, and pass resources on to future generations.

  Assets, as you probably already know, can be anything from cash savings to home equity, and as you probably also know, it’s really important for your financial health to have them. But it might seem strange to talk about asset building for people who are experiencing homelessness or who are at risk of falling into homelessness, as they tend to have few, if any, assets.

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  Engaging TANF Leaders Gets Results

  December 03, 2012

  In July, The White House recognized Frank Cirillo, Director of the Mercer County Board of Social Services (MCBOSS) in Trenton, NJ as a “Champion of Change” for his work on ending family homelessness. It was well deserved recognition. Cirillo’s agency, which administers the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, has taken a leadership role in the effort to end family homelessness in Mercer County. The agency’s efforts have paid off.

  Over a two year period, the number of families experiencing homelessness on any given day in Cirillo’s county decreased by 20 percent.

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  NBC Spotlights Family Homelessness

  November 30, 2012

  Last night NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams ran a short news segment about two homeless families. It was a rare instance of a national television network sharing with the nation the plight of homeless families and the issues they face.

  One of the families spotlighted in the program received shelter from a church program that required them to move to a different church every week; while the other family faced the threat of being broken up because of the scarcity of shelters that accommodate large families or families with older male children.

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  Sleepless in Seattle (Because There’s So Much to See)

  November 27, 2012

  Recently, I had the privilege of visiting Seattle, the city that will be playing host to the Alliance’s more than 800 attendees during our 2013 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness this February. As the Alliance’s Director of Meetings and Events, I always visit the host venue for each of our conferences two to three months in advance to get a feel for the space as it relates to our conference schedule, and to choose conference menus and get a general lay of the land.

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  Call your Senators and Representatives! It’s National Sequestration Call-in Week!

  November 26, 2012

  As soon as the elections were over (literally, the next day), the nation turned its attention to the impending “Fiscal Cliff.” The fiscal cliff is a complicated amalgam of the immediate fiscal issues our nation faces – including debt, revenue, spending, and a few other things.

  One truly important thing to know about the fiscal cliff, though, is that it includes sequestration. Sequestration, as we’ve discussed on this blog before, is a fancy term for automatic, across-the-board cuts to non-defense, discretionary spending. Which, for our purposes, is a longer way of saying the fiscal cliff includes cuts to nearly all federally-funded affordable housing and homelessness programs, 8.2 percent in cuts that will take place on January 2, to be exact. These cuts would immediately impact thousands of our nations’ most vulnerable people, and their impact would eventually affect hundreds of thousands over the coming months.

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  Give a Gift that Gives Back

  November 23, 2012

  The holiday season is a time to be thankful and a time to make a difference in the lives of others! This Black Friday, instead of scouring advertisements or waiting in long lines to buy things that may or may not fit, consider giving a gift that supports the Alliance’s work to end homelessness. Here’s how.

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  Happy Thanksgiving!

  November 21, 2012

  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and as we look forward to spending time with our families and loved ones, it is time for showing gratitude and giving thanks. It has been a busy year for the Alliance. Yesterday, I spent a little time speaking with some of our staff in an effort to get an idea of where the Alliance stands as we enter the holiday season. It turns out that the Alliance has a lot to be thankful for.

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  What I Learned from My Son’s Chronic Homelessness

  November 20, 2012

  Recently, I argued this point in an essay for Health Affairs that later appeared in the Washington Post. I wrote that the mistakes of an earlier generation of policy makers – a generation of which I was a part – caused so much of the problem.

  Many years ago, we emptied our state psychiatric institutions for good reasons. They were often monuments to neglect or abuse. But when we emptied them, we failed to put in place the community-based service delivery system we needed.

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  Post-Election Advocacy: Educating New Members

  November 19, 2012

  Two weeks or so out from the excitement of the election, it may seem that not much has changed in the grand scheme of things. Not so! Due to redistricting, retirement, resignation, and competitive races, there will be many new faces around Capitol Hill this January. Already last Tuesday, eighty or so members of the freshman class of the 113th Congress arrived on Capitol Hill for their New Member Orientation.

  With all those new Members and with committee selections to be finalized around February, we can expect a lot of new people will be occupying significant decision-making positions.

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  Going from Homeless to Advocate

  November 16, 2012

  In recognition of National Homeless Youth Awareness Month, we at the Alliance are highlighting the issue of youth homelessness in our blog. For this blog entry, Jimmy Ramirez, a formerly homeless youth who went on  to become an advocate for homeless youth, shares his story.

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