Last year I was with a group of funders from all across the U.S. doing a ‘tour’ of Skid Row in Los Angeles. The group was being led by two residents, Jim and Ed – men who were formerly homeless but were now living in permanent supportive housing in the area. They spoke of their journeys, from life on the mean streets to lives of safety, dignity and permanence in their own homes.

As we walked down the street, lined with people asleep on the sidewalk, pushing shopping carts or sitting on curbs, one of the members of our troop asked our escorts about food. “Do people living on the streets get enough to eat?” she wanted to know. “What’s being done about feeding people?”

There was laughter from both men and they stopped and turned to us. “Enough to eat?” asked Jim. “We get so much food we don’t know what to do with it. Every community group, ladies group and faith group brings food to Skid Row. We don’t need more food – what people need here are homes.”

As Jim spoke I looked at all the people handing out food on the street, at the missions and organizations offering ‘hot meals’, at the people lined up to get their ‘three hots and a cot’, and then I looked across the street at Skid Row Housing – well-built apartment buildings that provided permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless individuals. I looked down the street to the Downtown Women’s Center, which provides permanent, dignified housing for formerly homeless women. I knew that all of these buildings had been built partly through the support of private funders and it dawned on me then that I was seeing both sides of philanthropy at work in this small area of Los Angeles.

On the one hand, there is a focus on immediate needs – on doing the compassionate thing and providing meals. On the other is the focus on permanent solutions, on helping people out of homelessness to stability and homes of their own. I would never suggest that providing meals or giving emergency aid isn’t absolutely vital. We need emergency solutions – we need to make sure people are fed and clothed and have a place to stay. Unfortunately, many funders have focused on this exclusively and don’t know that there is something beyond this. Instead they continue to put their resources solely towards emergency aid or towards things that may be compassionate, but aren’t always effective in terms of long-term solutions.

This is one of the reasons that Funders Together to End Homelessness came into existence. A number of years ago a handful of funders from across the country understood the opportunity and the responsibility they had to make the best use of their money possible to create solutions, not only temporary assistance. They knew that they had to hold themselves as accountable as their grantees for the outcomes of programs they funded. They also understood that homelessness was solvable and that private philanthropy had a catalytic role to play in making it happen. If we were to end homelessness, philanthropy knew it had to do things differently.

This small group of six funders was the beginning of Funders Together to End Homelessness. It is now a national network of over 150 members focused on solutions to homelessness. From small family foundations like the Frees Foundation to larger ones such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, members of Funders Together not only focus on good grantmaking, but they continue to learn the importance of forging community bonds, partnering with government, and actively supporting and carrying out advocacy to shift policies toward those that help lift up the most vulnerable, rather than keep them enmeshed in the ‘safety net’.

Philanthropy has taken a huge step forward, as many of the members of FT have shown – but there is still much to learn, and work to be done if we are to truly solve homelessness. That’s why we’re excited to hold our first-ever Funders Institute this summer with our partners at the Alliance. Working together in the planning, production, and execution of this exciting event, we look to engage philanthropy to support service providers in their national and local communities, and to actively work with government to solve the issue of homelessness. If you are a funder, please join us; if you’re a provider, advocate, or someone who simply cares passionately about this issue, we’ll see you at the 2013 National Conference on Ending Homelessness, where we can all share our stories and move forward together.

Funders Together to End Homelessness is a national network of foundations, United Ways and corporate funders who believe that we can end homelessness and that philanthropy has a catalytic role in making it happen. The executive director of Funders, Anne Miskey, has worked for a number of years in both the philanthropic and corporate sectors and is passionate about Funders Together to End Homelessness’s unique mission to engage philanthropy in the effort to permanently end homelessness. 

I entered the Pine Camp Arts and Community Center in the north side of Richmond eager to discuss the Richmond metro area’s homeless response system’s performance data. I was expecting a presentation filled with charts and graphs showing exits to permanent housing, costs per exits, returns to homelessness, lengths of homelessness, and other data to demonstrate the region’s performance towards reducing homelessness . These expectations were met  – but the most important thing I learned from the “Performance Improvement Clinic,” conducted by the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) and sponsored by Homeward and the City of Richmond, doesn’t fit into a bar graph . I learned that, if we are to end homelessness, we need a collective, honest, and courageous community response. 

Everyone at the table

The room was filled  with leaders from private, public, and faith organizations from across the homeless assistance spectrum. Leaders from local government, Departments of Social Services, mental health and substance abuse services, school based service organizations, housing developers, and homeless service providers  all came ready to discuss homelessness in the region. Organizations specializing in populations including victims of domestic violence, veterans, children, and families  all had a seat at the table. A collective response requires participation and coordination  from all groups and institutions that serve people experiencing homelessness.  When we recognize that no one organization can end a person’s homelessness, we understand that achieving our organizational missions depends on how effectively we work together.  Look around the room at your next community meeting. Is everyone who has a stake in solving homelessness at the table? If not, how can we  - as community leaders - get them to pull up a chair?

An honest look at what is happening

This is where the charts and graphs come in. Intuition, although integral to our thinking,  can sometimes be very wrong. The NAEH’s presentation of local data and national research on homelessness illustrated this point throughout the two day clinic. The current shelter and temporary housing system  was built around the concept of housing readiness. Intuitively it  makes sense: it takes a lot for most of us to maintain our housing. We have to make enough money, pay our rent or mortgages on time – all the while taking care of ourselves and our families. Why would we set people up in the middle of their housing crisis to take on all of that responsibility?  However, research shows that meeting the physical and emotional needs of yourself and your family while trying to get a job is much easier when you have a home you can call your own.  So, when I think about it, this “Housing First” approach intuitively makes sense as well . The data presented for the Richmond region suggested that programs with a housing first approach achieved better permanent housing outcomes and cost less than traditional shelter. When our intuition and the data align , we know we are on the right track to solving homelessness.

Courage to transform together

One of the small group exercises was a “Homeless System Simulation.” Beads representing people experiencing homelessness were placed on boards representing different interventions and programs. Each round of game play represented individuals coming into the system, being placed in different interventions, and then moving into permanent housing, staying in shelter, or going back on the streets.  As expected , when we tallied each group’s final score of unsheltered persons, groups that made changes based on the interventions that worked best had less unsheltered persons. The groups that performed the best operated with a sense of urgency -- quickly looking at what was going on, identifying what was working, and making the decision together to change . We all know that in real life this type of community transformation is much more complicated, sometimes overwhelmingly complicated. Having the courage to engage with each other and make the necessary and difficult decisions is imperative to achieving our collective mission to end homelessness in our communities.

Collectively, honestly, courageously

The Performance Improvement Clinic seemed to reenergize the Richmond region’s bold pursuits to address and end homelessness. This type of forum that brings leaders together to take a hard and honest look at their performance, share successes, identify areas of struggle, and renew a collective sense of responsibility  is exactly what communities need to commit to long term solutions to end homelessness.

In the above Alliance photo Alliance Capacity Building Associate Kim Walker speaks at a performance improvement clinic in Howard County, MD, November 2011.

When there are reductions, we look for what a community may be doing differently that has impacted their success in ending homelessness. Once we dive in deeper, we may use an exemplar program or community at our conferences and on our website, like we did with Fairfax County, VA. This could be you!

Even if your community hasn’t decreased homelessness, we still track all reported increases and decreases on an interactive map on our website. As of the posting of this blog, 17 out of 30 communities have reported a decrease in homelessness. If you click on a particular location, you can find the original source of the data.

If you’d like to have your community featured on our map, email a link to your count or a media clip that discusses your count to counts@naeh.org.

We have a little more than two months to go before our next National Conference here in DC. Two months seems a long time at this point, but putting these conferences together is a huge undertaking and we’re all very aware at how quickly the conference can sneak up on us. So we’re already busy preparing the 80 workshops for the two-day event. (I’m currently in the middle of lining up speakers for my two communications workshops, which I’m very excited about.)

While the workshops themselves are still far from finished, we have nailed down their titles, which you can find on the conference website, and we’ve determined  the conference tracks. Workshop tracks are designed to guide participants who are interested in a given topic through a progressive set of workshops. Each workshop in a track will build on the previous one, resulting, we hope, in a complete as possible picture of that issue.

Here’s a quick look at the tracks we have planned. Please bear in mind that these are very brief descriptions. With 80 workshops, it would be crazy to try to cover everything in a single blog post. You can find a full list of the comprehensive descriptions and their corresponding workshops on the Alliance website. For now, this should give you a taste of what you can expect to see in July.

Workshop Tracks for the 2013 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness

Our ADVOCACY track will be geared toward those of you who are interested in honing your advocacy skills, learning what federal budget cuts may mean for ending homelessness, state advocacy opportunities, and for those interested in participating in Capitol Hill Day. Workshops will cover:

• Funding for ending homelessness
• Policy priorities in state capitals
• Advocacy messaging and strategies

Our SYSTEMS track is designed for Continuum of Care leaders and other stakeholders who are trying to craft a coordinated homeless assistance system out of individual programs and services. It will provide information on how to bring providers together and allocate resources effectively. Workshops will cover:

• Creating partnerships with reluctant providers
• Planning an effective emergency shelter system
• Retooling Transitional Housing

Our YOUTH track will cover community-wide systemic responses to youth homelessness and will focus on the implications of the HEARTH Act, data on homeless youth, as well as best practices in delivering housing and services to homeless youth. Workshops will cover:

• Child welfare agencies’ role in ending youth homelessness
• Using host homes to shelter and house youth 
• Collecting and incorporating Youth Data

Our VETERANS track will look at veteran oriented programs, research, and practices. It’s meant to offer a wide range of veteran oriented content for both new and existing grantees, organizations who serve veterans, and anyone who is interested in veteran homelessness assistance. Workshops will cover:

• The next steps for ending veteran homelessness
• Rapid re-housing program design
• Veteran employment programs

Our CHRONIC track will cover effective strategies for working for providing the services and supports to people who need them in order to remain stable in permanent supportive housing (PSH). The track also offers workshops on overarching strategies to end chronic homelessness. Workshops will cover:

• Employment strategies for people with disabilities
• Connecting with Medicaid to pay for supportive services
• Conducting successful street outreach

Our RAPID RE-HOUSING track will explore how community providers can negotiate with landlords, design short-term rent subsidies, and deliver voluntary case management services to individuals and families in their own homes. Workshops will cover:

• The basics of rapid re-housing
• Options for Providing Rent Subsidies
• Home-based, voluntary case management

Our ENDING FAMLY HOMELESSNESS track will provide a broad overview of the program strategies and partnerships that communities need to have in place to end family homelessness.  It will examine the critical interventions, research on rapid re-housing, and how to target the most vulnerable families for permanent supportive housing.  Workshops will cover

• Emerging research on rapid re-housing
• Identifying and serving your community’s most vulnerable families
• Using TANF for rapid re-housing efforts

Our CoC/HEARTH track will provide information about some of the major changes to CoC programs and examples from communities. This track will touch on a range of issues, including governance, performance, prioritization standards, and reallocation. Workshops will cover:

• Using reallocation to support strategies that work
• Tips for developing effective prioritization and eligibility standards
• Strategies to improve performance and outcomes

We at the Alliance are beginning to hear stories about how poor mothers with children across the country are being affected by the spending cuts to assistance programs under sequestration. These cuts are further restricting an already fragile support system for low income families and taking a toll on the lives of mothers and their children.

Head Start programs that provide parenting support and child development services are being cut. Low income families are losing the housing subsidies they have been promised. And many of the women who will feel the impact of sequestration are survivors of domestic violence who have fled violent homes only to end up in emergency shelters.

This Mother’s Day, many of us will be fortunate enough to spend the day with a special person who has shown us unconditional love and care. While many of us will celebrate with food, laughter, and comfort, let us not forget the thousands of mothers who will spend this special day in homeless shelters, temporary  housing, or on the streets.

Many of these mothers will spend this day without their children, having sent them to live with family or friends to protect them from the dangerous realities they face each day just trying to get by.

In honoring your own mother, and the many mothers in this country who are struggling, we hope you will consider making a gift in their name. The Alliance works diligently every day to end and prevent homelessness, and we simply could not do this work without the support of people like you who recognize that everyone deserves a place to call home.

Click here to learn more about making a gift in your mother’s honor or memory.

Back in February,  about 900 advocates, practitioners, and officials convened in Seattle for two days of sharing innovative practices and new research on family and youth homelessness at the Alliance’s 2013 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness. These are the keynote remarks delivered by the Alliance's President and CEO Nan Roman at that conference.

Keynote Remarks

Nan Roman

2013 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness

February 21, 2013

Let me start by saying how tremendously grateful we at the Alliance are for the hard work and dedication of everyone here today. We CAN end homelessness – in each of your cities, towns and communities and in our nation. And when we do it, it will be because of you.

You are talented and committed practitioners who take extraordinary measures every day to end homelessness for families. You are determined youth workers who labor so long with so little but still accomplish miraculous things. You are gifted policymakers who recognize that compassion alone is not enough, but that we need systems and programs and resources to end homelessness. You are brilliant researchers who question conventional wisdom and build a case for innovative solutions. And you are people who have drawn insight from your own painful experience of homelessness in order to inform our efforts and remind us why we cannot give up.

Thank you for coming here to share your wisdom with us.

We survived the recession without a big increase in homelessness. And that is good – the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) and your hard work are responsible. In 2012 there were 236,000 people living in 77,000 homeless families, according to the national Point-In-Time Count, which, for all its inadequacies, provides the only apples-to-apples comparison that we can make from year to year. While that number represents a rise in homelessness among families of 1.4 percent from 2011 to 2012, it also represents a 3.7 percent reduction in family homelessness since 2007. Unfortunately, we don’t have numbers on homeless youth.

Given the imprecision of this data, I would say that the number of homeless families over the past five years has remained more or less constant. Given the recession and economic downturn since 2007, it is tempting to call that a victory. However, this is just not good enough.

We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to get the numbers down further. The way I see it, we have three options to accomplish that. One, we could secure more funding from the federal, state, or local levels for homeless programs. Two, we could address the economic drivers of homelessness: the shortage of affordable housing and declining incomes. Or three, we could find efficient alternatives that allow us to end homelessness for more people with less funding.

Let’s take a look at the first option. The prospects for getting a whole lot of new federal money through appropriations are not good. As you are all aware, the national debt, the federal deficit, and the sequester are all likely to limit the amount of federal money that will become available for homeless assistance. And we haven’t heard much good news lately about state or local spending, either.

One exception is the Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program, a program very similar to HPRP, but designed for veterans and their families. It will likely receive increased federal funding in the coming year. So anyone who is working with families or youth who have a veteran association should look to SSVF, or other programs under the Department of Veterans Affairs, for some help.

Increased funding is unlikely, but it is not impossible. Historically, we have seen increases in homelessness assistance funding even when Congress cut funding for other programs. So we are not going to stop advocating for more funding. Advocacy is essential, if only to ensure that funding for homeless assistance at least holds even from year to year.

That brings us to our second option.  As we all know, the phenomenon of homelessness is, indeed, a complex one, but we also know that, for most families, it is driven primarily by the mismatch between incomes and housing. For people with low incomes, affordable housing is limited. Neither the minimum wage nor welfare can provide them with enough money to pay for housing. When it comes to meeting the demand for units of housing in their price range, the country remains more than 6 million units short.

While ending the affordable housing crisis would cost even more than direct funding to end homelessness, cause for hope may be on the horizon. The National Housing Trust Fund, which the president has signed into law, has never been funded. The National Low Income Housing Coalition is making a big push this year to ensure that it is. I urge you to support this effort, the goal of which is to provide $30 billion a year for 10 years.  That should be enough to end homelessness, and the Alliance stands firmly behind this initiative.

This year the Bipartisan Policy Council, a think tank that draws on the political and economic expertise of  leaders from both parties to conceive bipartisan solutions to big questions, formed a Housing Commission. That Commission – on which I was honored to serve – will offer its recommendations next week. I am not allowed to say what they are today, but I can tell you that they will include a bold and expansive proposal to address the housing needs of the lowest income people. And I can tell you that this proposal too would end homelessness.

Of course, both these initiatives would be dependent on new federal money for affordable housing. Given what I’ve already said about the federal budget situation, you may be asking yourself why I’m even talking about them.

One potential game-changer that could set the stage for these initiatives is comprehensive tax reform, which could put the mortgage interest and other home owner tax deductions on the table. Together these deductions are worth tens of billions of dollars. Another is the reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which may include a host of new mortgage fees. Either of these could produce substantial new revenues. Much would go toward debt reduction, but you can count on a big effort to capture at least some for housing, and, specifically, for meeting the housing needs of the most vulnerable.

So those are the first two options. And we have to be realistic and admit that, though they are promising, they are far from certain.  If we manage to secure increased funding for homeless assistance, it is unlikely the increases will be substantial enough to make a huge difference. And while the Administration could realize new revenues from tax reform and new mortgage fees, capturing enough of it to address the shortage in affordable housing will be difficult. Even if the housing Trust Fund were fully funded, it could still be years before we saw the impact.

That leaves us with our third and final option, which is to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of our programs in order to help more people with the same amount of funding, or less.

I don’t think we can wring much more efficiency from our programs by working harder, making copies on both sides of the paper, or things like that. But I DO believe that we have some ability to do more with less, and that our destinies and those of the families and youth we care about are, to some degree, in our hands. At a minimum, we should be capable of reducing the numbers again – at least among families.

And we really do need to improve our numbers. Even before spending cuts we are still leaving a lot of people behind. According to the 2012 Point-In-Time estimates, 21 percent, one in five families, are unsheltered. We don’t know how many homeless youth there are, so it is impossible to say how many aren’t sheltered, but given that there are hardly any beds for youth, I would guess it is a high percentage. Increasing cost-effectiveness and efficiency is no longer optional; it’s a matter of extreme urgency and, for the families and youth who rely on these services, it’s a necessity.

When it comes to serving homeless families, our primary aim should be to house people faster. Instead of spending money on supporting homeless families while they live in a facility, why don’t we help them move into their own place and then provide services for them there? The way to do this at the program level is rapid re-housing accompanied by transition services that strengthen ties with their new communities.

Data from community after community have shown the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of rapid re-housing. Recently we compiled data from 14 cities and found that, in these communities, rapid re-housing was the best intervention when it came to the metrics that matter: performance, outcomes, and cost. In these 14 cities, more people went from rapid rehousing programs to permanent housing than from shelters or transitional housing. While 32 percent went from shelters to permanent housing and 55 percent went from transitional housing to permanent housing, rapid rehousing performed the best: 85 percent of families from rapid rehousing programs moved to permanent housing.

Are families who exit transitional housing more likely to hold on to their housing because of the services they receive? To get an idea, we looked at data from seven communities that tracked this outcome, and we found that all forms of assistance performed well:  Only 9 percent of families who exited shelter for permanent housing became homeless again; and only 11 percent of those exiting transitional housing for transitional housing re-entered the shelter system.  But rapid re-housing still did best:  only 4 percent of families who were rapidly rehoused became homeless again.

So rapid rehousing has better results. Compared to shelter and transitional housing, more people exit to permanent housing, and fewer become homeless again, but what about the cost? In the 14 communities we looked at, the average cost per exit to get a family into permanent housing was $22,000 from transitional housing, as compared to $10,000 from shelters. Rapid rehousing was the least expensive: $4,000.

Now of course nothing is ever simple and we all understand that numbers don’t come without their caveats and complications. But I believe that these data, and the experience of advocates and practitioners working in communities across the country, indicate that we need to make some changes. If we are going to help more families with less money, we are going to have to shift money from other programs to rapid re-housing.

You may have heard the saying, “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.” Well, we are likely going to have a serious budget crisis, and we should not let it go to waste.

You now have a year to think about how to take advantage of the crisis. It is possible that there won’t be enough funding for all renewals for Continuum of Care and other community funding in the immediate future.  We can’t just stay on autopilot. We must be more dynamic. With new data, new research, and new practices, we can improve our program models and come up with more innovative combinations of interventions. We can shift money from transitional housing to rapid rehousing. We can make sure our shelter systems are short term and exit-focused. And we can move from a program approach to a systems approach.

And it is time that we stop viewing the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) as an onerous HUD requirement and accept it as an invaluable tool. The data in HMIS can show us what works and what doesn’t, and that will show us how best to deliver services to homeless families, re-house families faster, and make sure they stay housed.

Finally, there must be enough shelter for those who need it. Not everyone needs rapid rehousing or another placement. With a few nights of shelter many will figure something out on their own. Managing who needs what, however, will remain a challenge. So it is time that we figure out the crisis response or short-term shelter system.

Coordinated assessment and entry are crucial, but not a tool for funneling families away when you don’t have enough shelter. If you find that the people you are assessing need something you’re unable to provide, you aren’t doing coordinated entry, you’re just creating a waiting list. You can use coordinated assessment and entry not just to assess people, but to assess your system to determine whether a family can go someplace besides shelter—diversion – or to evaluate your resources and determine what you need to move around or create so that you can keep people moving through the pipeline.

When we’re already leaving a fifth of homeless families unsheltered, we cannot  afford to resign ourselves to doing less for homeless families simply because we have less money – not when we have so many more smart alternatives.

When it comes to youth experiencing homelessness, the story is very different. I cannot advise you to do more with less, because the sad reality is that we’re currently doing very little with practically nothing. So we don’t need to do more with less. We just plain need to do more.

At our 2012 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness we presented a typology and framework for youth homelessness. I won’t go over it in detail again today, but I do want to refresh your memory, because I think it is helpful in thinking about how we can do a better job for youth.

In many ways, youth experiencing homelessness are not that different from adults who experience homelessness. Nearly 2 million kids leave home every year, but like adults, most experience homelessness for only a brief period. Most return to housing or their families pretty quickly and more or less on their own, and the majority remains connected to their homes or schools.

However, for nearly 100,000 unaccompanied youth, the homelessness experience is far more serious, and their connection to home or school is either tenuous or nonexistent. About 40,000 of them live with a disability or other serious barrier to housing stability.

And let’s not forget: bad things can happen quickly. Even youth who experience homelessness for only a few hours are in danger. So for the youth who return home after a brief episode, we need a crisis system that gets them home faster and protects them during their period of homelessness. For that 40,000 youth with the most intensive needs, who are often creamed out – we need to screen them in.

While homeless youth need housing, they also need housing with adults. Not all youth homelessness is a product of dysfunction within a family. Many families split up because they cannot afford housing. In such cases, homeless youth benefit greatly from interventions like family finding, family intervention, and family reunification.

Much work remains to be done in order to integrate the youth homeless system with the adult system via HEARTH – not so that we can send homeless youth to adult shelter, but so that we can access more services and improve assistance. As HEARTH is implemented, we need to think carefully about how to integrate youth in the data systems, the coordinated intake, and the outcome measuring. Already, about 50,000 young homeless families a year receive assistance from the adult family systems.

Obviously this is also a complex conversation and one that has really stepped up over the past year. There are many fantastic workshops during the conference exploring these and other issues around youth homelessness.

I would be remiss if I did not mention in my remarks today some of the most important players in our national struggle to prevent and end homelessness – funders, both private and public.

As for the public funders, right now we are blessed to have brilliant and determined people at some of our federal agencies, in particular the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs. And Barbara Poppe and her staff at the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness are working to coordinate homeless and mainstream resources across agencies. We are honored to have some of these people here with us today, and I encourage you to seek them out at the conference.

All of these federal partners are working hard to get mainstream programs on board, because we are not going to end homelessness through homeless programs alone. Clearly, the mainstream programs must stop sending people into homelessness. Clearly, mainstream programs can do more to help families and youth escape homelessness, and to support people who do become homeless.

However, most of the decisions about what mainstream programs will do are made in the states and localities. Unfortunately, people often assume that the players at the local level – Housing Authorities, Workforce Investment Act (WIA) boards, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) offices – are tapped out or lacking in resources. In fact, it is often the case that no one has ASKED them to be a partner in ending homelessness. So yes, budgets are tight. But I urge you to ask your mainstream programs to be your partners, and do so often. If you don’t ask for anything, you won’t get anything.

As for the private funders, we need them to be strategic, too. Again, we have some absolutely terrific funders here with us today. Funders Together to End Homelessness, headed by Anne Miskey and chaired by David Wertheimer of the Gates Foundation, has been working with funders around the country to help them stop funding the bad stuff and start investing in the good stuff. And they are awesome partners. I urge you to get your local funders to connect with Funders Together – you’ll be glad you did.

In closing, I would just like to say that we have a lot of work ahead of us. Moving forward, we must take stock of our programs to ensure that they are performing efficiently AND leading to good outcomes. We must continue to develop homelessness systems that effectively deploy resources and meet the needs of families and youth experiencing homelessness. And to do all of this, we must become more effective advocates and better at letting our elected officials know what we need. As long as the goal of ending homelessness drives us, we will continue to improve.

Over the course of the conference, I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity learn from and explore the ideas of the many incredibly well-informed people who are here today from around the country, from whom we at the Alliance learn EVERYTHING, as well as share your own.

And again, thank you so much for being here and for all you do. We at the Alliance feel privileged to be your colleagues, and we honor you for the work you do every day to end homelessness.

In our media-driven, socially-conscious era, every month has its many associations, and May is no exception. Did you know that May is National Salad Month? Neither did I. It’s also National Mental Health Awareness month and Military Appreciation Month. It’s fitting that these two issues share a month because, due to over ten years of continuous conflict, they are inextricably linked.

With a small, all-volunteer military pressed into duty for over a decade, many service members have faced multiple deployments and experienced  sexual trauma, horrifying urban combat, traumatic head wounds, and they have suffered from lack of employment opportunities when they return home. All of these factors can contribute to mental health issues.

As many as 40 percent of all veterans will experience some form of mental health or trauma related symptoms as a result of their service.  These are complex and often long lasting conditions that veterans will live with for many years. The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have both struggled to come to grips with this growing problem.

As a society, our history of treating mental health issues, particularly among veterans, is shaky at best. For far too long people who live with mental health conditions have had to put up with social stigma, misdiagnoses, and general disinformation. When it comes to serving veterans, mental health awareness can provide some helpful insights when paired with an appreciation and understanding of military life.

Whether you are a service provider, administrator, concerned citizen, friend, or family member of a veteran who struggles with these conditions, there are some things to know: service members make up only 1 percent of our society. They are screened and selected based on a wide variety of high physical, legal, and intellectual standards. Many who attempt to join the military can’t meet these standards.

Members of the military are used to the people around them being “squared away,” that is to say, they expect their peers to be of strong mind and body. Service members rely on one another for accountability and security, when they fall short they feel they have let down their unit and themselves. There is a sense of failure, both personal and institutional.

DoD has made great strides in recent years to reduce this stigma. VA has attempted to educate providers on some of the basics of military culture and PTSD in free trainings.  As concerned members of society, it is our job to welcome our service members back to the civilian world with understanding and a deep sense of respect for the sacrifices the have made on behalf of all of us.

Photo courtesy of Metsuki Doll's Flickr.com photostream.

If you are a veteran struggling with mental health issues, or have a loved one who is, there is help. Please check out these VA resources. You can also find an anonymous online mental health screening here and resources for veteran families here.

On Monday, Ann Oliva, Director of the Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs at HUD released a letter (read it in full here) with information and recommendations for CoC leaders and stakeholders. The letter outlined four things community stakeholders should consider in striving to reach the goals laid out in Opening Doors. We have a number of resources on our website that address the various recommendations in Ms. Oliva’s letter, and I wanted to highlight them today because I know our website can be a little overwhelming at times.

Recommendations from Ms. Oliva’s letter are in bold; our resources are underneath each one:

1)   Develop a community-wide plan to address homelessness, including a conscious strategy of how to use CoC and ESG Program funds to support the strategy.

The Alliance has two calculator tools that can help spark discussions on community-wide funding priorities:

• Homeless System Evaluator Tool. This tool allows communities to input their data to determine whether their homeless assistance system moves people into permanent housing quickly, helps people remain in housing, and generates these and other positive outcomes cost-effectively.
•  Performance Improvement Calculator. This tool allows a community to experiment with their data to determine what impact changes in funding or performance on different homelessness interventions can have.

Ms. Oliva’s letter also encourages communities to “prioritize the use of ESG funds for proven strategies, especially rapid re-housing” when developing these funding priorities. Published last year, our paper, “The New ESG: Using the Lessons of HPRP and Other Initiatives to Inform ESG Implementation,” provides six recommendations for doing just that.

2) Direct assistance to those who need it most and in ways that promote ending homelessness.

Implementing a coordinated assessment process in your community makes it more likely that homeless household will be served by the right intervention more quickly. Our Coordinated Assessment Toolkit is continuously updated with new tools and community examples.

Targeting resources to “those who need it most” is very important in a time of limited resources. Two presentations from past Alliance conferences explore this further:

• First Served: Prioritizing Tenants for Permanent Supportive Housing. Permanent Supportive Housing is one of the most robust and costly interventions, and it should be prioritized for people experiencing chronic homelessness.
• Developing System-Wide Prioritization and Targeting Standards. In these conference presentations, HUD provides direction on how to develop these standards, and Lianna Barbu from Columbus, OH presents her community's standards as an example.

We also need to make sure we are not excluding those most in need of our serves by imposing program admission criteria that rejects people based on sobriety status, employment status, or criminal history. One way to incentivize programs to serve more difficult households is by risk adjusting performance measures.

3) Invest in and use data to drive decision-making on homelessness, both for the overarching plan and for annual allocation decisions.

Measuring our performance with data is the only way we can know if we are succeeding in our goal of ending homelessness. I recommend the following resources on this topic:

• The Importance of Performance Measurement. This blog post provides a conscious introduction to performance measurement.
• What Gets Measured, Gets Done: A Toolkit on Performance Measurement for Ending Homelessness. This toolkit is your Performance Measurement 101. It addresses how to design a system, using data to manage or change a homeless system, and understanding and implementing system-level performance measurement.
• The Columbus Model: Becoming a Data Driven System. There is no need to design a performance measurement and improvement system from scratch. Columbus, OH has an effective data-driven system, and this toolkit provides you with their tools and strategies for adoption in your own community.

4) Form strategic partnerships with mainstream agencies and funders to prevent and end homelessness.

Innovative communities are leveraging a variety of mainstream resources to help end homelessness. I recommend the following resources on this topic:

• Making Effective Use of TANF. It is possible to use TANF funds for short-term rent assistance to help families avoid or quickly escape homelessness.
• Five Strategies for Building a Successful Relationship with Your Local VA. This paper was the result of interviews with various communities’ that have forged successful partnerships with their VA.
• Creating Successful Partnerships with Public Housing Authorities. These conference presentations discuss this issue from the perspective of homeless service organizations, and Housing Authorities themselves.
• FACT SHEET: Homeless Services and Medicaid Enrollment. It is important that homeless service providers prepare for their role in helping with enrollment in new health care coverage. This Fact Sheet highlights key information needed to begin conversations with community leaders and partners, including where to go for more specific information, and will be updated as new materials become available.
• Changing Child Welfare’s Response to Unaccompanied Minors. This short blog post discusses what role child welfare agencies can play in ending homelessness.

The Alliance recently released our own set of recommendations, “Recommendations for Effective Implementation of the HEARTH Act Continuum of Care Regulations,” which contains even more resources.  

Between 2011 and 2012 overall homelessness among veterans decreased 7.2 percent, which is great progress, but the rate of homelessness among veterans remained higher than the rate of homelessness among the general population, at 29 homeless veterans for every 10,000 veterans in the general population.

Last week, the Alliance published a one page graphic representation of the current trends in veteran homelessness. The map on this one pager shows the one year change in veteran homelessness from 2011 to 2012 in each state. Minnesota decreased veteran homelessness by 31.2 percent, the largest percentage decrease in the country.

The federal government has a stated goal of ending homelessness among veterans by the end of 2015, meaning the end of veteran homelessness would be reflected in the 2016 point in time counts conducted in late January 2016. In this line graph, the sharp decreases you see from 2013 to 2015 are due to the expected increased and continued impact from two veteran specific programs: SSVF and HUD-VASH.

How is your community doing ending veteran homelessness? Email the Homelessness Research Institute at counts@naeh.org.

Many people automatically associate homelessness with mental illness, based on stereotypes of men and women on city streets, disheveled and talking to themselves. In fact, certain groups of people experiencing homelessness do live with severe mental health conditions, though this is not true of all homeless people. With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, this is a good time to take a look at the connection between homelessness and mental illness.

Of the 633,800 people who were homeless on any given night in 2012, about 99,900 people (or 18 percent) could be described as severely mentally ill. Many are chronically homeless, meaning they have been without homes for a long time or have experienced multiple episodes of homelessness. Their mental conditions make it impossible for them to remain stably housed for long without intensive help. The consensus in the homeless assistance field is that best way to help them is by providing permanent supportive housing.

That’s not the entire story, however. Anyone experiencing homelessness, for any reason, may confront challenging conditions like depression, anxiety, or addiction. They also may experience trauma. An episode of trauma might have caused their homelessness, or might actually have resulted from a homeless episode. Often, the most effective way to help these people is a limited but realistic amount of aid, including housing and voluntary short-term services to support their continued stability. This is known as rapid re-housing.

For many of the most vulnerable people, access to proper mental health care services, including preventive care, can help them avoid or escape homelessness for good. A recent study of health reform in Oregon, the Oregon Health Insurance Study, showed that people who obtained Medicaid coverage were better able to access health care services and, as a result, suffered less from depression and had fewer financial worries.

One promising new source of funding is the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, which offers increased Medicaid coverage for mental health and substance abuse services. If all states implement the Medicaid expansion, the lives of millions of low-income adults with mental illness and substance-related conditions could be improved. If you’re interested in learning more about the impact of the ACA on homelessness, visit the Health Care page of the Alliance website.

Providing housing and services tailored to meet the needs of individuals who suffer from mental health conditions takes commitment and cooperation at all levels. And while mental health treatments and trauma-informed support are crucial, the most important service for all people experiencing homelessness is the one that offers a permanent place to live. This is the basic principle of Housing First, which recognizes that, for people to recover and reach independence, they must be stably housed first.

That’s what we at the Alliance, and advocates, service providers and officials around the country are working so hard to accomplish.

Image “Homeless and Cold” courtesy of Ed Yourdon’s photostream.