Slides from a presentations by Cynthia Nagendra of the National Alliance to End Homelessness from a webinar that originally streamed on Tuesday, April 7, 2015 covering steps one and three of the Alliance's "5 Steps for Ending Veteran Homelessness" document.

1. 1
Ending Veteran
Homelessness
Cynthia Nagendra

2. • No Veteran in your community is ever
forced to live on the street.
• When homelessness does occur for a
Veteran, it is rare and brief.
• Homeless Veterans are quickly
housed and few return to
homelessness.
• If a Veteran is about to become
homeless, prevention is available.

3. Where do we start?

4.  Identify and coordinate with all the
necessary partners and
stakeholders to begin meeting A
LOT (every week)
 Create a Master List of Names
Some Key Strategies to End
Veteran Homelessness

5. • One program or agency cannot end veteran homelessness alone
• To oversee this effort, the primary planning/oversight group should
involve people who can make decisions for their agencies from:
• homeless service providers network, the VA and VA-funded
providers (SSVF, VASH, GPD), and other major funding partners
• Think of non-traditional partners to engage for other activities
(especially to provide housing units):
• Mayor’s Office
• Landlords/Property management companies
• Faith community
• Businesses
5
Coordinating with Partners

6. • Yes, meet every week
• Make the meetings action-oriented and make all partners accountable
• Use the master list to determine veterans’ housing needs,
barriers, next steps
• Identify changes that need to happen at the agency and system-
level and make those changes
• Establish common goals and targets: how many veterans are we
going to house each week/month/this year?
• Be willing to change how you do things at your program
6
Coordinating with Partners

7. • Set deadlines, benchmarks, and
targets and track all partners’
progress towards shared goals
7
Coordinating with Partners

8. 8
Master List
Create a Master List of Names
of all Veterans experiencing
homelessness living on the streets
and in emergency shelter

9. 9
Why You Need A Master List
• Ensures that all providers and partners are on the
same page and have a clear sense of the people,
(not just numbers), that need housing
• Facilitates communication between the local VA and
Continuum of Care (CoC) and aids in the
identification of veterans that may be ineligible for VA
services
• Enables all partners, including the CoC and VA, to
quickly find and house all homeless veterans as soon
as a housing opportunity becomes available

10. 10
How to Make a Master List
Identify all homeless veterans
in your community
• 2014 and 2015 Point In Time Count
• HMIS
• Coordinated Entry System

11. 11
How to Make a Master List
• Contact every shelter and transitional
housing program in your community that
may have veterans
• Work with local VA healthcare programs
• Work with your local homeless outreach
team to find unsheltered veterans

12. How to Make a Master List
Begin to create a shareable master list
and start “working it” immediately.
• Start with however many names of veterans you
have now and continue to build the list as you find
more homeless veterans
• Share this list at your veteran-focused regular
meetings with partners
• All partners should start “working the list” together

13. How to Make a Master List
Manage and update your list as
regularly as possible.
• Your starting list may have names that are no
longer in need of services so scrub the list of
people who should no longer be on it
• Remove those already housed
• Remove those who can’t be contacted (after
many attempts)

14. How to Make a Master List
Manage and update your list as
regularly as possible.
• Most importantly, find every veteran and keep building
the list
• Add names every day of those newly found in emergency
shelter
• Work with the outreach team to find and engage all
veterans and add them
• If no outreach team, get volunteers to go outreach (like
PIT Count volunteers)