LA's City Hall Leads a New Fight Against an Old Foe: Homelessness

Washington’s Anchor Community Initiative helps youth experiencing homeless by improving communities’ response systems with better data, more funding, and better connecting community organizations and specialists.

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.

Victims of trauma are at risk for substance abuse, depression, or other difficulties. Trauma Recovery Centers are becoming increasingly prevalent for their ability to provide a wide range of services.

Two Northern Colorado counties and Fort Collins, especially, face high levels of homelessness. It's not because there are no organizations dedicated to the issue. Rather, a lack of coordination among the veterans' service groups, state and federal welfare departments, and homelessness prevention groups has stymied effective solutions to decreasing homelessness. Now, state-supported Homeward 2020 has implemented a data management system and housing placement accountability program among the service providers. The low-cost model is showing success, and will be rolled out to other regions across the state.

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.

As campuses across the country race to address a burgeoning nationwide conversation about sexual assault, policymakers, politicians, university counselors and students alike are faced with a lack of quantitative information. But Yale University has taken significant steps to collect and distribute information that may finally change the toxic culture of campus sexual assault.

New Orleans implemented an extraordinary 10-year plan that engaged unprecedented cross-sector collaboration between government, non-profit, and private entities to provide housing and housing services to the city's homeless veterans. The city's success in providing homes for every single veteran formerly on their streets motivated cities across the nation to tackle the crises using similar means, leading to a 1/3 decline veteran homelessness since 2010.

Municipal ID programs such as IDNYC provide identification for residents who aren't able to access official government IDs, such as those who are undocumented or unhoused. The municipally-issued IDs make it easier for these residents to access local services and benefits and interact with officials, including law enforcement.

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.