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In preparation for the FY2013 Continuum of Care (CoC) Program competition, SNAPS will issue a new "weekly focus," a series of messages and related materials about policy priorities and key information to help CoCs and project applicants prepare for the FY2013 CoC Program Competition. Each SNAPS Weekly Focus will go out via OneCPD listservs. You can also check back here weekly to view new messages and find related materials.
Author: Beth Sandor, Director of Improvement, Community Solutions
The goal of collecting monthly housing placement data is to help communities develop a transparent feedback loop.
The FY 2013 - FY 2014 CoC Program Competition NOFA was published and e-snaps opened on Friday, November 22. The competition will be open until Monday, February 3rd, 2014.
In order to really increase progress and meet the goals of Opening Doors, we’re going to have to think outside of the box and establish partnerships with entities that are not already engaged. This weekly focus is on two key partners: Public Housing Agencies and the Philanthropic Community.
Author: Anne Miskey, Executive Director, Funders Together to End Homelessness
At Funders Together to End Homelessness, we believe that we can end homelessness in our communities and in our country. How do we do it? Here’s what we know: We have to work together, and Conversations need to happen at the national, regional, and local levels.
Over the last several years, better information has emerged about how different homeless service models really work, which has prompted a discussion about what we as a community might do to make sure that our housing and service programs reach as many people as possible with the best outcomes possible.
Last week, we talked about the Housing First approach and how it is both a cost-effective and successful model for addressing the needs of the people we serve. This week, we’re going to discuss another model that has proven to be effective and which follows a Housing First approach: rapid re-housing.
When we started this weekly focus series, we talked about making changes to business-as-usual approaches. Each week, we’ve focused in on strategies that communities should consider implementing in order to make their systems as effective and efficient as possible. This week, we’re going to discuss an approach to housing that is proven to be both cost-effective and successful for the people we serve.
Between 2010 and 2012, we saw an 18% decline in the number of homeless veterans, and we expect that we will see further decline in the 2013 PIT data. We all know that ending veterans homelessness requires intense collaboration at the national, state, and local levels. HUD (including multiple offices within HUD) works closely with our partners — the VA and the USICH — through an innovative relationship we call Solving Veterans Homelessness as One. Even though each agency has a very different operational and program structure, we have decided that on the issue of veterans homelessness, we would work around those differences to make collaborative decisions and recommendations to our leadership.
Author: Darla Bardine, Policy Director, the National Network for Youth (NN4Y)
In light of the federal frameworks and collaborative strategies that have been published this year by federal agencies and U.S. Congress, the National Network for Youth (NN4Y) created a Comprehensive Framework to End Youth Homelessness.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the importance of prioritizing chronically homeless persons in your permanent supportive housing as a way to increase progress on meeting the first goal of Opening Doors. While ending chronic homelessness is a top priority for HUD, we have not forgotten about the Opening Doors goal of ending homelessness for families, children, and youth by 2020.
Welcome to week four of SNAPS Weekly Focus! This week's message discusses the need for communities to leverage mainstream resources while implementing their homeless assistance programs. It also provides examples of mainstream resources available to communities.
Welcome to week three of SNAPS Weekly Focus! Last week’s message addressed why CoCs should prioritize chronically homeless persons in permanent supportive housing. This week, I am going to talk about how implementing a coordinated assessment system will help your CoC address prioritization and more effectively achieve its system-wide goals and objectives.
Authors: Martha Kegel, Executive Director, UNITY of Greater New Orleans and Stacy Horn Koch, Director of Homeless Policy, City of New Orleans
Just a few years ago, New Orleans had one of the nation’s highest rates of chronic homelessness. This distressing phenomenon was largely due to the lingering effects of the Hurricane Katrina levee failures in 2005, which wiped out the city’s stock of affordable housing, shattered the health and behavioral health systems and scattered the extended family and community networks on which so many vulnerable people once relied. At the height of recovery in 2007, the number of homeless persons in New Orleans skyrocketed to 11,619. Through the hard work of the 63 agencies of the Continuum of Care, UNITY of Greater New Orleans and the City of New Orleans that daunting number has dropped significantly over the years from 8,725 in 2009, to 4,903 in 2012 to our current number 2,337 a 47% decrease from the previous year.
Welcome to week two of SNAPS Weekly Focus! Last week's message talked about changing the way we do business. This week I am going talk in more detail about one of the changes that you can make within your CoC or permanent supportive housing (PSH) project that will help to end homelessness for the most vulnerable people we serve – persons experiencing chronic homelessness.
The SNAPS Office has traditionally used the annual Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the Homeless Assistance Competition to communicate and implement our policy priorities in a given year. For example, if one of our major policy priorities in a year was to end chronic homelessness, funding was prioritized for that population with bonus and other new funds. In a year where the Administration’s policy priority was to address rural homelessness, funding for projects serving rural areas were prioritized through our selection criteria. The implementation of the new programs authorized under the HEARTH Act has given us an opportunity to review our past practices and identify what we have done well in the past, and what we need to improve going forward.