Opening Doors Across America is a call to action for states and local communities to join USICH in preventing and ending homelessness in America by taking four key steps:

1. Align your community plan with Opening Doors 
2. Set targets and measure results 
3. Act strategically 
4. Partner in the national effort to end homelessness 

We are excited to share the growing participation in this initiative. Today, we are highlighting the State of Connecticut and Santa Monica, California. We will continue to report progress made in states and communities around the country in the coming months. Once your state or community joins the initiative, let us know and your success might be highlighted here.

-  Learn more about Opening Doors Across America

-  Join the Initiative

Connecticut recently became the first state to develop a state plan to end homelessness that is fully aligned with our national plan, Opening Doors. USICH discussed the development of Opening Doors Connecticut with Carol Walter, the Executive Director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness and staff at the Partnership for Strong Communities.

Benefits to Connecticut of an aligned plan

• Improves access to interventions for people experiencing housing crises by setting a course for collaboration at all levels of government and across jurisdictions.
• Encourages uniform use of best practices.
• Coordinates outcome measures, ensuring all communities are truly measuring progress and that measurements are comparable.
• Accesses federal resources and eases federal reporting requirements.
• Saves state dollars by reducing the burden on public systems and by increasing efficiency of state distributed resources.

Connecticut's process of alignment

Five things you can do now in your state

The City of Santa Monica has made progress in all four of the key steps of Opening Doors Across America: plan alignment; setting targets and measuring results; acting strategically; and partnering. In the past four years, they have developed, updated, and implemented their strategic action plan to end homelessness which calls for "targeting resources, evaluating the effectiveness of services such as housing and special initiatives, and identifying opportunities to transform service delivery" collaboratively across city agencies. Last month, Santa Monica joined Opening Doors Across America, but they have been acting on the four steps of Opening Doors Across America for years.

-  Learn more about how Santa Monica has achieved success 

-  Take action now and join Opening Doors Across America