Yesterday, I had the honor and privilege to stand with First Lady Michelle Obama and with Veterans Chris Fuentes and Doran Hocker to announce the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness.

With HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, VA Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson, and with mayors and county officials from across the country, The First Lady charged all Americans to commit to the goal to end homelessness among Veterans in 2015 and to act with urgency, saying, "even one homeless veteran is a shame...the fact that we have 58,000 is a moral outrage."

Homelessness among Veterans is impossible to accept.  But we don't have to accept it; we can solve it.  We have the power, resources, and know-how to ensure that no Veteran has to live on the streets, or in cars or abandoned buildings, or in the desperate circumstances people find themselves in because they don't have a home.  

Among the goals of Opening Doors, the Federal strategic plan to end homelessness in the United States, is preventing and ending homelessness among Veterans in 2015. This ambitious but achievable goal is supported by a growing list of mayors, governors and county leaders committed to actions that end Veteran homelessness.

Learn More About the Mayors Challenge

USICH is pleased to announce that Katy Miller will join our National Initiatives team as a Regional Coordinator on June 23, 2014. Katy will be based in Seattle and will work with states and communities in the western United States. 

Katy comes to USICH having worked for more than 18 years as an advocate, housing provider, and funder of homeless housing and services in Seattle - King County. As a public and private funder for the last nine years, she has been instrumental in forming funding partnerships to create thousands of housing opportunities for individuals and families in the region. 

Katy has also played an important role in launching new initiatives and funding resources to help people move out of homelessness into permanent housing, such as the Washington Families Fund, Landlord Liaison Project, Career Connections, and the Client Care Coordination system for targeted recruitment of the most vulnerable and high utilizers of expensive systems into permanent supportive housing. Katy is passionate about creating innovative connections and solutions towards ending homelessness.  

"Katy is a terrific addition to our team," reported Matthew Doherty, Director of National Initiatives, "and we know the communities that she works with are going to truly benefit from her expertise, her commitment, and her history of innovation."

Eric Grumdahl

Evidence plays a central role in shaping Federal policy. Through the implementation of Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, evidence has transformed Federal homelessness programs. This is particularly the case for Veteran Affairs programs. Our progress--a 24 percent reduction in Veteran homelessness in three years--is directly tied to the commitment to apply evidenced-based practices to end homelessness, particularly Housing First, permanent supportive housing, and rapid re-housing.

Housing First is an approach to remove programmatic barriers so that people experiencing homelessness get access to the interventions they need, while focusing those interventions on housing outcomes, without preconditions like sobriety, income, or other measures of "readiness." It puts housing forward as the solution to homelessness and holds us to the commitment to end homelessness for all-not just those our programs are best positioned to serve. In that way, it puts people over programs. And yes, for some providers and communities, it involves changing the way they do business.

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