September 9, 2025, Washington, D.C. — The National Alliance to End Homelessness has announced the grantees for its 2025 Workforce Innovation Grant. This grant was created to address the significant challenges that homeless service providers face, including low salaries, limited professional development opportunities, high turnover, and insufficient budgets. This fund will award a one-time grant of up to $50,000 to continue an existing project or start a new one to address workforce needs.
“Front line service providers are essential to ending homelessness, but they face barriers every single day that most people never see,” said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Through this grant, organizations can better build the capacity to support their workers’ lifesaving work.”
Organizations were selected based off their proposals to support the recruitment, promotion, advancement, and retention of high-quality homeless services staff. Two organizations were chosen as recipients of the grant.
The Lived Experience Advocacy Network (LEAN) is a Minnesota-based nonprofit that is led entirely by people with lived experience of homelessness. They aim to shift power by equipping and supporting people with lived experience to lead advocacy efforts, influence policy, and shape service systems. Their project will seek to address the shortage of workers with lived experience of homelessness who are being meaningfully supported once hired into the homelessness sector, forcing them to navigate trauma, tokenization, or unspoken workplace expectations.
This fund will allow LEAN to launch “Ladders & Lifelines,” a program that will support people with lived experience who are either actively seeking employment or already working in the field. Ladders & Lifelines will offer group-based peer support circles, job-seeker readiness training, 1-on-1 mentorship, guest sessions, and toolkits and digital resources. This project is intended to respond directly to member requests and fill a gap seen across the field, as well-intentioned hiring brings people with lived experience into roles, but neglects to offer further support that promotes retention, healing, or leadership growth.
The Oasis Center serves young people in various capacities including teens who are unhoused, youth in crisis, teens in need of counseling, and teens in prevention programs in Nashville, Tennessee. They offer more than twenty different programs and services based on the foundation of four areas for youth success: safety, belonging, empowerment, and generosity. The Oasis Center has an incredibly successful track record: 97% of the teens exiting the Emergency Shelter were reunited with families or transitioned to safe living situations outside of foster care.
The grant would allow the Oasis Center to support their workers in many ways. Funds would go toward mental health support, self-care events, holiday shift bonuses, and wellness stipends. Moreover, this funding would contribute to career mentors and hotels by the facility so that the staff can still go to work during inclement weather. Finally, there would also be money put toward staff apparel so that the Oasis Center can spread the message about who they are and what they do.
Over the two-year grant period, the Alliance will publish a compendium of community-based strategies or innovations and a short paper on the impact of the innovation from each of these organizations. The Alliance hopes to share replicable ideas gathered through the application process with the homeless services field at large.
“The Alliance is extremely inspired by the work of LEAN and of the Oasis Center and is proud to support them through this fund. By supporting the recruitment and retention of homelessness service workers, the field will continue to grow in high-quality, efficient, and effective ways,” says Oliva.
About the National Alliance to End Homelessness
The National Alliance to End Homelessness is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to preventing and ending homelessness in the United States. As a leading voice on the issue of homelessness, the Alliance analyzes policy and develops pragmatic, cost-effective solutions; works collaboratively with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to build state and local capacity; and provides data and research to policymakers and elected officials in order to inform policy debates and educate the public and opinion leaders nationwide.
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