Blog: Homelessness Ends Here

The Frey Family Foundation announced yesterday that it is making a new $5 million investment to expand its past support for advocacy efforts to end homelessness across the state, becoming the third member of Funders Together's national Steering Committee to announce a major gift to fight homelessness in the past two weeks.

And so we're going to be initiating a range of programs, as well, to deal with homelessness. One area in particular I want to focus on is the issue of veterans. The rate of homelessness among veterans is much, much higher than for non-veteran populations.

Solving homelessness is in everyone's interest. Not solving homelessness costs more than ending it with housing and supportive services. Homeless people are more frequently ill, but with little access to health insurance; minor illnesses become serious and expensive emergency room care becomes routine treatment. People living in public places increase managment costs for cities. And children like Joey risk becoming homeless adults, perpetuating the vicious cycle.

Today the Boston Globe and other newspapers nationwide published an Associated Press article about people with mental illness living in nursing homes posing a threat to frail elderly people who also reside there. It is an unfortunate reminder of the pervasive stigma of mental illness that a few isolated events in nursing homes became newsworthy enough for national publication. Fortunately, the article does reference the much more important story: that thousands of younger people with mental illness or other disabilities languish in nursing homes because states have failed to provide appropriate housing and services in the community.

Two members of the national Steering Committee for Funders Together - the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - have announced significant new funding commitments for regional efforts to end homelessness.

After the devastation hurricanes Katrina and Rita waged on housing resources for people with disabilities, homeless and disability advocates, consumers, service providers, and state and local government agencies successfully advocated for the inclusion of 3,000 new Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) units in Louisiana’s Road Home hurricane recovery plan. The result is the nation’s first state-driven PSH system using integrated, scattered-site housing linked with evidenced-based mobile community supports for the most vulnerable people with disabilities - including people who are homeless and people at risk of unnecessary institutionalization - supported by cross-system partnerships that provide a structure for program design, policy development, and implementation.

We've posted links in a special new section of the Funders Together site to key partners' analysis of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as it relates to homelessness and supportive housing.

See two video clips from the soon-to-be released move, The Soloist, about the true-life friendship between Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally ill homeless musician he meets on the streets of Skid Row.

Los Angeles has often been referred to as “the homeless capital of the world” and has a reputation as a bit of a basket case when it comes to addressing homelessness. With more than 70,000 homeless persons on any given night (a third of them chronically homeless), a highly visible concentration of street homeless in Skid Row, and famously uncoordinated public safety net systems, Los Angeles County is often thought of as beyond hope when it comes to successfully ending – or even reducing – homelessness. Despite these great challenges facing Los Angeles, there has been progress in addressing homelessness, especially chronic homelessness, in recent years.

On March 9th, Shelly Geballe, co-founder and current Distinguished Senior Fellow at Connecticut Voices for Children, presented an analysis of the “Federal Budget Overview as it relates to Connecticut” to a room full of funders in Hartford attending a summit on “Government and Philanthropy working together.”