A 65-year-old veteran who has been living on the street for over a decade.
A family that is struggling after a recent job loss and only enough savings to last a month.
A gay teen who is no longer welcome at home after coming out to his family.
A mom and her child fleeing an abusive partner.
The reasons people become homeless are highly individualized. But most are related to a loss of income, housing, health, safety, or key support systems. Our funding directly addresses these interrelated root causes, with a longstanding commitment to housing as key foundation for dealing with all other issues.
We believe that to effectively meet the needs of thousands of individuals and families experiencing homelessness, each with their own set of strengths and challenges, we need to take a “systems approach” to ensure care is coordinated and each person gets the right response at the right time. Because we know that many people become homeless after living in foster care or being released from jail, we also need to work with systems like child welfare and criminal justice to prevent people from becoming homeless.
A Focus on Systems Change
Too often responses to homelessness have focused on the immediate crisis at hand: lack of shelter, food, or safety. While crisis care is vitally important, what happens over the following weeks and months is critical to preventing a person or family from remaining homeless or ending up homeless again.
Addressing root causes is challenging, and there isn’t always a clear roadmap. We are willing and able to take the long view and learn what is working well and from what is less successful. Based on evidence and our own experience over the past 25 years, we believe that ending homelessness requires:
a commitment and willingness for all of us to rethink how we do our work, collaborate, and learn together in new ways
organizations to cross traditional boundaries and individuals to change and expand their roles and relationships
the support and engagement of influential leaders who believe homelessness can be ended and can communicate a vision for doing so