ending veteran homelessness - cynthia nagendra

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Ending Veteran Homelessness

Cynthia Nagendra

• 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.

Where do we start?

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

• 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

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Coordinating with Partners

• 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

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• Set deadlines, benchmarks, and targets and track all partners’ progress towards shared goals

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Master List

Create a Master List of Names

of all Veterans experiencing homelessness living on the streets

and in emergency shelter

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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

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How to Make a Master List

Identify all homeless veterans in your community

• 2014 and 2015 Point In Time Count

• HMIS

• Coordinated Entry System

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• 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


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


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)


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)

ending veteran homelessness - cynthia nagendra

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