Obama administration unveils national strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness

address this challenge," said USICH Vice Chair and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. "Achieving the goals in Opening Doors will require strong partnerships with Congress, states, localities, philanthropy, and faith based and community organizations across the country. After all, the people of our nation are best served when we work as a team.

Opening Doors serves as a roadmap for joint action by the 19 USICH member agencies along with local and state partners in the public and private sectors. The plan puts us on a path to end veterans and chronic homelessness by 2015, and to ending homelessness among children, family, and youth by 2020. The Plan presents strategies building upon the lesson that mainstream housing, health, education, and human service programs must be fully engaged and coordinated to prevent and end homelessness, including:

* Increasing leadership, collaboration, and civic engagement, by a focus on providing and promoting collaborative leadership at all levels of government and across all sectors and strengthening the capacity of public and private organizations by increasing knowledge about collaboration and successful interventions to prevent and end homelessness.
* Increase access to stable and affordable housing, by providing affordable housing and permanent supportive housing.
* Increase economic security, expand meaningful and sustainable employment and improve access to mainstream programs and services to reduce financial vulnerability to homelessness.
* Improve health and stability, by linking health care with homeless assistance programs and housing, advancing stability for youth aging out of systems such as foster care and juvenile justice, and improving discharge planning for people who have frequent contact with hospitals and criminal justice systems.
* Retool the homeless response system, by transforming homeless services to crisis response systems that prevent homelessness and rapidly return people who experience homelessness to stable housing.


The HEARTH Act, enacted by Congress in May 2009 mandated that the USICH produce a "national strategic plan" to end homelessness to Congress and the President. Beginning in January 2010, USICH held regional stakeholder meetings, organized federal working groups focused on specific populations, solicited public comment through an interactive website, and engaged experts from across the country to develop an action plan to solve homelessness for veterans, adults, families, youth, and children.

...