National Alliance to End Homelessness

Newsletters | April 12, 2010

Rapid Re-Housing Clinic Series
The Alliance and its Center for Capacity building, in partnership with the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, recently completed its Rapid Re-housing Clinic series in Los Angeles, California. The series provided training to 25 participants representing 12 organizations from across Los Angeles County providing a range of services to homeless families and individuals. The series spanned a four-month time frame to provide participants with time in between each session to reflect on content presented at the previous session. Participants were given discussion questions and occasionally homework to take back to their organizations to help transfer the skills they were learning to other staff within their organization. The series included five interactive workshop sessions on the basics of rapid re-housing, how to design a rapid re-housing program, assessing client needs and targeting resources, case management strategies, and working with landlords.

To learn how you can bring the Rapid Re-Housing Clinic Series to your community, email Damien Heath.

FAQ: HPRP Implementation
Q: Can a household receiving a Housing Choice Voucher (formerly Section 8) receive assistance with the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program?
A: A household receiving an ongoing housing subsidy cannot receive HPRP rental assistance to help with their portion of the payment for the current or future months, HPRP can be used to help the household pay for up to six months of arrears in cases where the household has fallen behind on its portion of the payment.

Q: How are communities able to help households that cannot afford the rental application fees which HPRP cannot pay for?
A: Some communities who have built strong relationships with landlords have been successful in asking the landlords to waive the application fees or at least not ask for it upfront since the agency or program will have already assessed the household.  Other communities have asked local faith congregations to donate towards households application fees.  Creating unique partnerships will be the key to assisting households in ways HPRP cannot.

High Performing Rural CoCs
On March 16, the Center for Capacity Building at the Alliance released Critical Success Factors in High Performing Rural Continuums of Care?. This paper examines five core strategies used in four rural communities to make strides toward ending homelessness, implementing their Ten Year Plans, and meeting the housing and service needs of homeless families and individuals. This paper also launch a webinar series on rural strategies for ending homelessness that will take place over the next several months.  The first webinar will be held on April 15 from 3:00 to 4:00 pm ET.  This webinar will feature Llyod Pendleton and Jonathan Hardy from Utah’s Balance of State Continuum of Care.  They will be discussing how building political will can create the groundwork for a movement towards system-wide change.  If you have ideas for other topics that can help rural communities end homelessness, please email the Center for Capacity Building.