Fast forward to December 31, 2015, to a the White House Press Room where President Obama is holding a press conference announcing that we have effectively ended homelessness among veterans in our country. This may seem improbable – it is in fact only 360 days away – but we learned in 2014 that it is completely possible.
2015 will be a “nose to the grindstone” year for ending veteran homelessness. There is so much money and so much know-how out in the field right now; we know what works to get veterans permanently housed, and the Department of Veterans Affairs has provided (and will continue to provide) ample funds to make it happen. There are communities that have already accomplished the goal of ending homelessness among chronic veterans – Houston and Phoenix to name a couple – and as communities across the country fan out for their annual Point-in-Time Counts, I have no doubt that we will be hearing from many, many more.
But we’ll also begin hearing from communities that have effectively ended veteran homelessness. Binghamton, NY has already made the announcement, and New Orleans is queued up to announce it this week (much more on that later in a few days).
This brief describes needed legislative activity around the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) homeless veteran programs in the upcoming 114th Congress. The Alliance and its national partners will be advocating for these changes to improve the effectiveness of VA’s efforts to end veteran homelessness.
This webinar, which originally streamed on Wednesday February 26, covers the Department of Veterans' Affairs' (VA) recently released Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program. Speakers address how "surge" funding represents a huge opportunity for the 78 communities that will receive it and also discuss the current state of the national push to end veteran homelessness and look at good rapid re-housing models.
The HUD-VASH program is a joint program of the Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Veterans Affairs (VA). Congress should continue to make ending homelessness among veterans a top priority by providing $75 million within HUD and $278 million with VA for new HUD-VASH vouchers in FY 2014, the amount requested in the President’s Budget Proposal to house an estimated 10,000 additional veterans.
