By Jennifer Olney, Community Investment Officer, Partnership to End Homelessness
On any given night, nearly 1 in every 100 DC residents experience homelessness, living on the streets or in the city's emergency shelters.
The Community Foundation’s recent VoicesDMV Community Insights report found that nearly one in three residents know someone who has experienced homelessness or who is at risk of becoming homeless - and that many residents are struggling to find affordable housing. Lack of stable housing makes it very difficult for people to stay safe, obtain or maintain employment or an education, address health needs, and keep children in school and families together.
DC has a plan to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring, and that plan is based on proven solutions; and prior to the current crisis, we know that plan was working. But we know that government alone cannot end homelessness or solve our region’s affordable housing crisis. It will take all of us coming together to do our part to ensure every DC resident has a safe, stable, and affordable place to call home.
Last year, the Greater Washington Community joined forces with the DC Interagency Council on Homelessness to launch the Partnership to End Homelessness. The Partnership is the District’s first-of-its-kind public-private initiative focused on ensuring homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring in DC. By joining together, we aim to increase the supply of affordable housing for extremely low-income households and to help our neighbors obtain and maintain stable housing.
In the Partnership’s first year we have celebrated a number of accomplishments.
We held a corporate symposium focused on corporate social responsibility strategies to address homelessness and affordable housing. Featured speakers included DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Rashema Melson, as well as senior executives from Kaiser Permanente, Zillow Group, Salesforce, and Cisco Systems, Inc. The symposium was highlighted in a Washington Business Journal article which called on the private sector and philanthropy to step up its investments and use its convening power to accelerate our community’s response to ending homelessness.
We announced the first round of grants for “flex funding” programs to support local nonprofits that provide Permanent Supportive Housing: Miriam’s Kitchen, Open Arms Housing, Pathways to Housing and Friendship Place.
Jennifer Olney and Silvana Straw co-lead the Partnership to End Homelessness and the Housing and Homelessness Working Group. The Working Group was created as a subcommittee of the COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund at The Community Foundation to address the unique needs of people experiencing homelessness during the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis. To date, this fund has granted over $1.25 million to support 36 nonprofit organizations working with and on behalf of people experiencing homelessness and housing instability to help maintain housing and access to shelter, medical care, and other critical services.
We partnered with Enterprise Community Loan Fund, Inc. to help fund the development and preservation of deeply affordable and supportive housing. The first set of investments supported the development and preservation of 448 affordable units providing housing for formerly homeless individuals living with HIV/AIDS and for extremely low-income families in NE DC. Learn more about this initiative.
We established a Leadership Council made up of private sector leaders and people with lived experience who are committed to ending homelessness. These individuals represent key sectors and will work with us to champion the issue and commit resources to this work.
We held a Donor Learning Series to bring together our donors with nonprofit leaders and people with lived experience to discuss solutions to address the affordable housing crisis and chronic homelessness.
With the help of the Daniel and Karen Mayers’ Challenge, we have raised over $2 million for our grantmaking fund to invest in nonprofits working with individuals, youth, and families experiencing homelessness to fill critical funding gaps, support innovative programs, meet emerging needs, build nonprofit provider and developer capacity, and support advocacy efforts.
We launched a quarterly newsletter for the Partnership which provides updates and opportunities to get involved. Sign up today!
While we celebrate these accomplishments, we also know that with everything that has happened over the past few months – a pandemic, an economic crisis, and a movement for racial justice – if anything, our work to end homelessness is more important now than ever.
With the advent of COVID-19, and the economic crisis, the number of people experiencing homelessness in communities across the country, many for the first time, could rise by nearly 45%.
We have seen the housing crisis deepen and a growing number of households worried about how they will pay rent next month. As with the pandemic and economic crisis, we know that systemic racism continues to mean our Black and African American neighbors are disproportionately impacted.
As we move forward in our work to ensure everyone in DC has a safe, stable home that they can afford, we commit to continuing this work with a focus on how we can address the disparities in the homeless service system and in the housing systems in DC. We feel the urgency and we know that the time is now to work together and step up to make sure that everyone in DC has a safe, stable place to call home.
We hope you will join us.