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The Alliance’s Center for Capacity Building is leading the implementation of solutions that reduce homelessness in communities across the country. The Center accelerates the adoption of solutions that are cost effective, data driven, and that will ultimately accomplish the goal of ending homelessness.
Working with a strong network of innovators, the National Alliance to End Homelessness identifies and evaluates hundreds of policy and program strategies and their impact on homelessness. The Alliance’s Center for Capacity Building helps communities replicate and customize the best of those strategies. The Center focuses on strategies that are cost effective, data driven, and can be implemented at a scale that can significantly reduce homelessness.

Implementing the HEARTH Act
The Center is developing tools and training resources to help communities implement the HEARTH Act, legislation that reforms HUD’s McKinney-Vento homeless assistance programs. The Center’s assistance will focus on helping communities structure their homelessness assistance to achieve the HEARTH Act’s ambitious goals.

More information about HEARTH Implementation training and tools

Creating Systems Change
Innovators around the country have implemented strategies that have successfully reduced homelessness. The Center helps bring the most successful of those strategies to your community:

  • Creating a performance improvement infrastructure
  • Homelessness system design based on cost and impact analysis
  • Converting transitional housing and shelter resources into prevention and rapid re-housing
  • Creating a front door to the homelessness system that prioritizes diversion, effective targeting, and rapid re-housing
  • Implementing community-wide rapid re-housing

The Center creates tools to support communities and help them network with each other to share knowledge, experiences, and challenges. The Center continuously evaluates the effectiveness of these tools and activities to continuously provide the most effective support.

For more information about receiving customized support from the Alliance, contact Norm Suchar, Director of the Center for Capacity Building, at nsuchar@naeh.org or 202-942-8255.

If you have general questions about effective strategies for preventing and ending homelessness, please email us at thecenter@naeh.org. We may post your question in our discussion forum to allow others to respond to your email as well.

Successes

  • Southeast and Central Ohio:  The Alliance spearheaded a two year initiative to develop of the first regional plan to end homelessness in a rural area among seventeen counties of rural Ohio.
  • San Francisco/Bay Area, CA:  The Alliance directed the Shifting Gears Initiative that brought together nine agencies within the San Francisco Bay Area Region to shift their housing resources and services from transitional to permanent solutions.  
  • Fairfax County, VA: The Center is working with the Office to Prevent and End Homelessness to implement their Creating a Blueprint for Success ten year plan to end and prevent homelessness.  The Center more specifically supported the design of an assessment and targeting process.
  • Montgomery County, MD:  The Center is helping the county implement its Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness and restructure their Continuum of Care committees to more effectively analyze their homelessness assistance system.
  • Washington, DC: The Center is helping the District revise their ten year plan to prepare for the performance measures the HEARTH Act will collect.

Library Resources

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Newsletters  |  April 12, 2010
The Center for Capacity Building puts out quarterly newsletter outlining the activities, developments, and tools offered by the Center. This is The Keys: Rapid Re-Housing Clinic Series, the spring 2010 edition of the newsletter.
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Solutions Brief  |  November 25, 2009
This document provides a summary to the November 12, 2009 Virtual Discussion on HPRP Implementation. It contains 26 questions asked during the Virtual Discussion, along with the responses given by Alliance staff.
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Toolkits  |  November 19, 2009
This tool is designed to help communities identify possible partners and accountable agencies within their Housing First system based on the three main outcomes of a Housing First system: prevention of homelessness, reduction in the length of time of homelessness, and decreased recidivism.