[Photo: Rudy Salinas, PATH]
David Bornstein, who does the NYTimes Fixes column, takes a long look at 100,000 Homes Campaign, which, for its incredible success, required innovative cross-sector collaboration in each city that participated. It's a great example of collective impact at work, and communities that are becoming trauma-informed can probably find a few pieces of gold here.
Sometime in June, the 100,000 Homes Campaign — an initiative launched four years ago to help communities around the country place 100,000 chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing — expects to announce that it has reached its goal. It’s a significant milestone: It means that many American cities are currently on track to end chronic and veteran homelessness by the end of the decade or earlier.
The campaign, which is coordinated by Community Solutions and works in partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, has helped to shift the way homeless organizations and agencies around the country set goals, measure progress, prioritize individuals and coordinate their efforts to house people living on the streets.
Consider Jacksonville, Fla. In 2011, when the city began engaging with the 100,000 Homes Campaign, 3,025 of its residents were homeless and 1,104 were chronically homeless. Earlier this year, the city reported that the number of homeless residents had dropped to 2,049, with 399 of them chronically homeless, according to Shannon Nazworth, the executive director of Ability Housing of Northeast Florida. That’s a drop of one-third and two-thirds, respectively.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/the-push-to-end-chronic-homelessness-is-working
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