CoC Strategic Work Plan Online Learning Clinic - End Chronic, Veteran and Elderly Homelessness

Why does our CoC Strategic Work Plan have an entirely separate goal for these populations? On one level the answer is rather simple: Opening Doors, the national strategic plan to end homelessness and the HEARTH Act of 2009 prioritize these (at least, the first two, explicitly). However, that doesn’t really answer the question, because then the question is, why did Congress, expressing the will of the nation, as a whole, prioritize these groups?

Cindy J. Crain, MDHA President and CEO, with Dennis Culhane

Prioritizing these groups follows an idea called progressive engagement. Dennis Culhane, one of the leading scholars of the modern homelessness crisis, and his colleagues discuss this at length. This graph, from their article, is very helpful in understanding what this approach is all about:

(Courtesy of Culhane, Metraux and Byrne)

As we explain in our playbook, before the HEARTH Act, the experimentation with Rapid Rehousing during the Great Recession, and the advent of the Housing First movement, Continua of Care and their grantees often served clients on a “first come, first served” basis, using a “one-size fits all” approach. This often meant that we served those who figured out how to best access the system, not those who needed the most help, and that we made everyone we served go through the exact same programs. This left our services, for everyone, lacking.
 
Using a progressive engagement approach, we serve each person, according to their needs, prioritizing those who need the most help. Not surprisingly, most people don’t need a huge amount of help, and those who do, vary by their level of vulnerability and scope of need. The greater the vulnerability and scope of need, the greater and more urgent the need for help is, and the greater the cost of that help.
 
Typically, the chronically homeless, veterans and the elderly will fall into those groups that are on right hand side of the graph. This does not always mean that that more intensive investment will come from the core of the homeless response system. As Culhane and his colleagues explain, and as the graph itself indicates, these may be provided by mainstream services aligned with the homeless response system. This is what this goal in our plan emphasizes too, particularly in action items 4, 7 and 10.
 
Prioritizing veterans also makes sense from an ethical standpoint. Veterans have given, of themselves, to our nation. We, as a nation, recognize that we have a heightened obligation to them, and so allowing veteran homelessness to continue would be a moral failure.


(Courtesy of USICH)

As a nation, we have proved up to the task. As the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) tells us: “A growing list of 50 communities, including the entire states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Virginia, have proven that ending Veteran homelessness is possible and sustainable… (C)ommunities across 26 different states have proven that we can drive down the number of Veterans experiencing homelessness to as close to zero as possible… The national data tell the same story… We've reduced Veteran homelessness by 47% in this country between 2011 and 2016—including a remarkable 17% reduction during 2015 alone—and achieved a 56% reduction in Veterans experiencing unsheltered homelessness.”
 
Congress had an additional reason to prioritize veterans. They recognized that the movement to end all homelessness would be met with skepticism. And, so, what if we could demonstrate that we could end the homelessness of a specific group? Would that not go a long way to proving that ending all homelessness was not a pipe dream?

And so, by making such strides towards ending veteran homelessness, we have shown, as a nation, that ending homelessness is a realistic goal, if evidence-based best practices and systems thinking are applied to the problem. Now that we have proven it possible, the moral imperative of our nation’s social contract compels us to apply these to all types of homelessness. All that separates us from this goal, of ending chronic, veteran and elderly homelessness, and the general goal of making all homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring, is the will to do it.