Resources
National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH)
A briefing paper on Five Strategies for Building a Successful Relationship with your Local VA
HUD ONECPD
SNAPS Weekly Focus: Collaborating to Combat Homelessness among Veterans (August 12, 2013)
United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH)
100k Homes Campaign
End Veteran Homelessness (web page)
Resources for Homeless Veteran Service Providers
Best Practices: Sharing Information to End Veteran Homelessness
In August 2013, HUD, VA, and USICH committed to a 100-day “boot camp” challenge to produce guidance to help communities allocate scarce housing resources to the most vulnerable homeless population within the restraints of both HUD’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) and VA’s Homeless Management Evaluation System (HOMES). Continuums of Care and VA Medical Centers can apply the best practices identified in Best Practices: Sharing Information about Homeless Veterans to accelerate progress toward ending homelessness among veterans in their communities:
- Creating and sharing a community-wide list of veterans,
- Using a tested, validated assessment to prioritize and target interventions, and
- Using navigators and/or guides to address individual veterans’ needs.
Vets@Home Toolkit
Identifying and Engaging Homeless Veterans
This toolkit provides information on best practices to identify and engage veterans experiencing homelessness. It provides guidance and resources to assist mayors, local officials, communities, and Continuums of Care (CoCs) to put goals and processes in place to end veteran homelessness.
This toolkit includes the following sections:
- Identifying homeless veterans through outreach
- Point-in-Time (PIT) counts and surge canvassing
- The benefit of having by-name lists
- Data sharing
- Best practices (including coordinated entry processes, coordinated assessment tools, and strategies)
- Community collaborative examples
- Learning how to work toward ending veteran homelessness in your community
- Methods to sustain the effort once the goal of ending veteran homelessness is achieved
Effective Homeless Crisis Response Systems
This toolkit provides resources and concepts for transforming homeless services to crisis response systems that prevent homelessness and rapidly return people who experience homelessness to stable housing. The US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) provides a framework to retool the homeless crisis system in Objective 10 of the Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. Given the immediacy of the Federal goal of ending veteran homelessness by the end of 2015, this toolkit is geared towards veteran specific resources.
This toolkit includes the following sections:
- Topic Overview
- Definitions and Key Concepts
- Components of an Effective Crisis Response System for Veterans
- Sustaining Efforts
- Mayor’s Corner
- Community Examples and Resources
https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Vets-at-Home-Crisis-Response-System-Toolkit.pdf
Connecting to Permanent Housing
This toolkit is designed for Continuum of Care (CoC) stakeholders, practitioners, and public officials to help broaden and strengthen their connections and access to permanent housing for veterans experiencing homelessness.
This toolkit includes the following sections:
- Strategies and resources for developing and maintaining housing partnerships to expedite helping veterans find housing
- Key questions for communities to assist in assessing their housing partnership portfolio and linkages with VA and other affordable housing resources
- Links to tools and resources to assist communities in their efforts with veterans
- Considerations for local public officials as they support this national goal
Housing Stability
This toolkit provides resources and concepts for housing stability related to veterans and their families who experienced homelessness but who are now housed.
The toolkit includes the following sections:
- A discussion of the core concepts of housing stability
- Key strategies and related resources to increase housing stability for veterans moving out of homelessness
- Considerations for local public officials as they develop local strategies to support this national goal
- Hyperlinks to related tools and resources, both embedded in the toolkit and assembled in a list at the end of the toolkit
https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Vets-at-Home-Housing-Stability-Toolkit.pdf