Homeless Between the Stacks

Homes for All Veterans, a program within the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Human Services, recently began training volunteers to walk the city's streets in search of homeless veterans, with the goal of effectively eliminate veteran homelessness by the end of the year. If successful, advocates say the push to end veteran homelessness could be the first step in addressing the city's larger, chronically homeless population.

Public libraries can serve as vital community resources. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Forsyth County Public Library operates as a multi-use facility thanks to investments from a voter-approved bond and state grants. In addition to meeting rooms and computer labs, the library provides peer-support specialists trained in assisting homeless patrons with mental health counseling and job services. Health clinics and other community partners also participate in initiatives housed at the library.

Atlanta has seen a decline in rates of people experiencing homelessness from 2008-2018, a trend that is particularly meaningful as other cities contend with stubbornly high numbers. Part of the solution? A new source of more flexible and consistent funding allowing non-profits to provide the assistance needed and help get people into permanent supportive housing.

San Francisco officials converted an abandoned school on the Mission’s skid row into a special kind of shelter with the means to take chronically homeless adults from the street and entire encampment communities, then navigate them into housing, without the traditional, degrading rules and regulations of other shelters. It’s become one of the most closely watched homeless-related projects in the country, and Seattle is one of the cities looking to potentially replicate their model to help address the homelessness crisis.

Through programs across the country, nurses, social workers, or trained mentors offer support to new or expectant parents, imparting skills to help them become better teachers for their children. Through regular home visits with the families, these programs are working to close an achievement gap between rich and poor children that starts as early as just nine months into a child's life.

San Francisco's Care Not Cash program began in 2004 in response to the city's homelessness crisis. One facet of the program is an outreach team, whose members regularly visit homeless people on the street to connect them to resources such as housing and drug rehabilitation.

The Salt Lake City Public Library employed in-house social workers and built out an area in the library dedicated to providing a variety of resources for people experiencing homelessness and anyone else looking for support. The staff helps people find individualized paths forward, and partner organizations host office hours for things like harm reduction services and workforce services.

Houston’s The Way Home collective is made up of 100 nonprofits with different approaches to combatting homelessness. Case managers enter information about people experiencing homelessness in the city into a database that shows all of the programs each person is eligible for and which nonprofits have space available.

Libraries across the United States are expanding what they offer to not just include books, but also a host of social and human services. From stocking an anti-overdose drug to offering mental health services and legal support, libraries are preparing to serve anyone that may walk through the door.

Riverside is the only city in California to solve veteran homelessness. The approach, called Housing First, works by placing vets into subsidized housing and then proceeding with support services like finding employment or rehabilitating from drugs/alcohol dependence. Now that Riverside has housed all of its 89 homeless vets, it is moving on to apply the same approach to their 400 chronically homeless citizens.