100-Day Homeless Challenge Kicks Off

Leigh Shields-Church’s “rapid-results” team emerged from a conference room lined with marker-scrawled battle plans with a new strategy and a bold goal: Place nearly all of New Haven’s chronically homeless into apartments of their own, by July 30.


The strategy resulted from a two-day “boot camp” attended by a dozen of New Haven’s homelessness services providers this week.




On Wednesday and Thursday, staffers from a host of social service agencies mapped out the ambitious approach to tackle homelessness in the city, and elected Shields-Church (pictured) of the Connecticut Mental Health Center as team leader.


The 100-day plan represents a rare coordinated effort between the many agencies in New Haven that deal with homelessness. For the next three months, a host of organizations will be teaming up to assess who among the city’s homeless need housing the most, helping those people to get ready to be housed, and then assigning them to apartments.


The 100-day challenge, funded by the United Way, is inspired by a similar program targeting homelessness on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, carried out with the help of the Rapid Results Institute. That organization usually works abroad, finding ways to jump-start international development projects with short-term, intensive efforts. It’s been applying those same techniques to tackle the problem of homelessness in this country.
Nashville and Chicago have undertaken similar attacks on homelessness. The initiatives target the chronically homeless, people who may have been out on the streets for years. The “housing first” model has shown that cities can drastically reduce homelessness and its costs by simply finding homes for the people who use the most homelessness resources or who are most endangered by homelessness.

Read complete article