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Youth Homelessness Documentary “The Homestretch” Airs on PBS April 13

April 9, 2015

Five years ago, a young high school student that Kirsten was working with on a theater project revealed to her that he was homeless and completely on his own. It was one of those moments in life when everything just stopped — how could this be? This kid was bright, talented, funny, and ambitious. He was going to school, attending rehearsals, and seemed so normal. But each night he didn’t know where he was going to go.

He was working hard to make something happen for himself while being alone in an impossible situation, and he was going to great lengths to hide his circumstances. For us, he put a completely unexpected face on homeless youth. And when we discovered that — at that time in 2009 — there were almost fifteen thousand kids registered as homeless in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system, we knew we had to make this film. This was a crisis and nobody seemed to be talking about it.

Ending Veteran Homelessness Step One: Creating a Master List

April 8, 2015

In order to house your homeless veterans in your community, you need to know who they are. That’s why creating a master list of homeless veterans in your community is step one on our Five Steps to Ending Veteran Homelessness. Creating a comprehensive list of homeless veterans in your community may sound daunting, but it could be easier than you think.

With coordinated assessment, regular and continuous outreach, and working with all your partners, your Continuum of Care should be able to create and maintain a list of veterans in your community who need to be housed. Here’s what we say in the 5 Steps.

The State of Homelessness in America 2015: Looking at the Big Picture

April 7, 2015

If you’re a leader of a Continuum of Care (CoC), you likely know how many people are homeless and how many beds for homeless people there are in your community. If you’re a homelessness service provider, I bet you have a pretty good idea of how many people you serve in your program, and how these numbers have changed over the past few years. And if you’re a concerned citizen, I’m sure you are aware when you see an unsheltered homeless person sleeping on the street or in the park.

Each of these experiences is a small part of the larger picture of homelessness in a state and in America. So when we add it all up, what trends do we see?

Thank You, Advocates! You Generated Strong Congressional Support for Homeless Programs

April 6, 2015

If you receive the Alliance’s advocacy alerts, you might recall that not long ago members of Congress were circulating “Dear Colleague” letters in the House and Senate.

These letters give members of Congress the opportunity to publicly sign on in support of robust funding levels for programs that they believe should be national priorities. The Dear Colleague letters circulating in congress that were of most interest to us, of course, were letters in support of increased funding levels for homeless assistance and affordable housing programs.

Just Released: The State of Homelessness in America 2015

April 2, 2015

Overall homelessness in America has declined, but millions remain at risk of falling into homelessness in the future, according to The State of Homelessness in America 2015, the fifth in a series of annual reports on the nation’s progress on homelessness by the Alliance’s Homelessness Research Institute.

The report, which we released today, examines national and state trends in the homeless populations and the number of beds available to assist them. It shows that, during a period of economic growth for the nation when unemployment decreased in nearly every state, the rate of homelessness fell by 2.3 percent, but the number of people at risk of homelessness remained at post-recession levels.

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