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Alliance President Keynote Remarks, 2015 National Conference on Ending Homelessness

August 3, 2015

I am so happy to welcome you to our national conference on ending homelessness. The board and staff of the Alliance are deeply gratified that you have joined us here. And we thank all of you, also, for what you do to end homelessness across the nation.

This has been a year with many challenges. The gap between those who have and those who do not is growing; and many who are poor feel that their opportunities to escape poverty are shrinking. There are tremendous and persistent racial disparities. The cost of housing is increasing, but incomes are not keeping pace.

These are the big picture problems, and we have our challenges on the homelessness side of things, as well. At the national level, funding is getting harder to come by. The work that you are doing – coordinated assessment and entry, rapid re-housing, permanent supportive housing, critical time intervention, housing first, trauma informed care – are more sophisticated and effective. But they are also harder, requiring different skill sets, different administrative infrastructures, and different types of accountability.

Employment is Part of the Solution: Reflections on the 2015 National Homelessness Conference

July 30, 2015

Clearly, there’s a growing recognition that employment is an important part of the solution to homelessness and a hunger for knowledge about what works, what funding is available, and how to deliver effective employment services.

Now is certainly an opportune time to renew the focus on employment: recent federal policy changes such as the passage of HEARTH Act and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) place an added emphasis on helping people experiencing homelessness succeed in the labor market and ensuring that employment services are accessible and effective. Moreover, the growth of the rapid re-housing strategy has brought attention to just how critical effective, specialized employment services are to keeping individuals and families employed and stably housed.

Diving in with Gospel Rescue Missions

July 28, 2015

Anyone who has been to a conference knows that they tend to be frenetic: idea sharing, solution swapping and networking. Last month, I went to the 2015 Association of Gospel Rescue Missions’ (AGRM) convention in Seattle and my experience was just that: frenetic, and fruitful.

For those of you not familiar, Gospel Rescue Missions (GRMs) or Missions are faith-based organizations that work primarily with those experiencing homelessness by providing shelters, transitional housing, treatment programs, and outreach services. Missions are often differentiated from non-faith based organizations because of their faith-based approach to these services.

3 Things I’ve Learned from Working at the Alliance

July 27, 2015

It is with a mixture of excitement and sadness that I write this “goodbye” blog post for the Alliance. After more than five years here, I am ready to take on the challenge of grad school, but I will miss working with passionate and driven people across the country dedicated to such an important topic.

In my time here, I’ve learned a few things – well, I’ve learned a ton of things, but for the sake of this post, I’ll narrow it down to just the big ones.

Report: Affordable Housing Increasingly Unavailable to Low-Income Renters

July 21, 2015

Here at the Alliance, we believe that homelessness has a solution: housing. This solution sounds simple, right? In many ways, it is.

So if the solution to homelessness is so simple, why haven’t we ended homelessness yet? In large part, the answer lies in a lack of affordable housing. Recent economic and housing trends have resulted in a shortfall of affordable housing, particularly for low-income households. This in turn has left many people homeless and many more people vulnerable to homelessness.

A recent report on housing and rental market trends from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, The State of the Nation’s Housing, shows that rents have been rising across the nation while the supply of affordable housing has been falling. The growing disparity has forced many low-income renters (particularly those in high-cost markets) into precarious positions and placed them at particular risk of homelessness.

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