I begin by bringing greetings from Council Chair and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Council Vice Chair and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.  I’d like to recognize the members of the USICH team that are present:  Laura Zeilinger our Deputy Director, Katharine Gale who has just joined us as a Policy Director, and our extraordinary team of Regional Coordinators, Matthew Doherty, Beverley Ebersold, Bob Pulster, and Amy Sawyer.

I’d also like to thank our DC-based Federal partners who have joined us, Mark Johnston and Ann Oliva from HUD, Don Moulds, Mark Greenberg, Barbara Broman, Sonali Patel and Resa Matthew from HHS, and  Vince Kane, Pete Dougherty, and John Kuhn from Veterans Affairs, along with other Federal partners who are here from across the country.

Before I begin my remarks on youth, I want to note that yesterday HHS released an Information Memorandum expressing the importance of addressing family homelessness with TANF funding for families experiencing or at risk of experiencing homelessness. 

The memo highlights the innovative work of our partners at the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development, the Mercer County Board of Social Services in New Jersey, The Utah Department of Workforce Services, A Safe Haven in Chicago, as well as the Diversion Cash Assistance program and the Gates Foundation here in Washington State. 

Our partners are proving that real solutions can come from existing monies and existing authorities, and that bringing mainstream resources to bear is essential to the goals of Opening Doors—to ending and preventing homelessness in America.

Why do we care about youth? 

I care about youth because I am a mother of two youth.  My son was fifteen when I started this position and my daughter was 22. As they’ve struggled through adolescence, they have needed tremendous support (as have my husband and I to be supportive parents).  All kinds of resources were needed to get them through high school to college and launched on a career path. We view these as investments in their future.

For me, youth homelessness is personal, as my children have friends who are struggling with family conflict, domestic violence, and other types of traumatic situations.  They are at risk of and have experienced homelessness.  Caring adults stepped in and they were connected to resources to complete their education and get a meaningful job, and my children’s friends are succeeding day by day.  There are the usual ups and downs of adolescence but they are on a pathway to stability. 

Everyone in this room knows the struggles of adolescence.  It’s personal for each of us, and we can tap that energy to create a national movement to invest in youth now. Many of you have stepped up already, and I’m hoping everyone will step up to create more and better solutions for youth.

For me, I decided to work through the Council and join with other stakeholders to make ending youth homelessness a national priority.  Today, I’ve been asked to share what the federal government is doing.

So how did we get started?

As you know when Opening Doors was released in 2010, we set the goal of ending youth homelessness by 2020. This past December, the 19 agencies that make up the Council along with our colleagues at the White House recommitted to this goal for action during our second term.

My bosses at the Council are all Cabinet Secretaries, who once they commit to a goal, get very serious about success.  We began this work by believing that we needed to:

• Be honest about what we know and what we don’t know
• Not let the absence of good numbers get in the way of figuring out how to leverage Federal investments to act more strategically
• Fill in the gaps in our knowledge through more research on effectiveness of interventions
• Focus especially on connecting Federal resources for underserved populations, including LGBTQ youth, foster care and justice involved youth, pregnant and parenting youth, and others
• Illuminate what harm reduction and housing first means for youth

We knew that homelessness among youth differs from homelessness among other populations. Youth—aged 13 to 24—have distinct developmental needs.  Youth are not mini-adults.  Lives change rapidly during these ages so interventions must be flexible and responsive to this unique developmental period.  There is also a subset of youth who are young parents, presenting another critical dynamic which must be considered when developing homelessness interventions for youth.

The problem of youth homelessness is often invisible. We knew that many youth do not access shelters. They do not want to be identified for various reasons.  In many states, it is illegal for youth under 16 to be “runaways.”  For older youth, the stigma of homelessness (especially if they are still attending school) is not something they want known.  We knew that adult shelters are too often not safe for youth. 

We also knew that multiple Federal agencies—HHS, Education, Justice, HUD, Labor—have programs for youth, but none were solely responsible for addressing youth homelessness. This created greater complexity and opaqueness about this critical segment of people who experience homelessness.

And we knew, most importantly, that there was not a clear understanding of the scope of the problem, and that there was limited to no national consensus on the best interventions for homeless youth.

To make youth homelessness more visible and to identify the most promising strategies that solve the problem, the Council in 2011 charged Commissioner Bryan Samuels at HHS-Administration on Children, Youth, and Families and USICH Deputy Director Jennifer Ho to co-chair an interagency workgroup to propose a framework to end youth homelessness by 2020. 

In addition—from the development of the plan up to the present—USICH has continuously engaged stakeholders across the country and our national partners, conducted focus groups with youth who had first-hand experience of homelessness, made site visits to programs, and held discussions with youth providers. Early last spring, USICH also launched a crowd-sourcing platform to provide an opportunity for all stakeholders to provide input.

The Federal interagency work group provided two reports to the Council along with a set of policy recommendations that were described as the Framework to End Youth Homelessness, in addition to recommending that the Opening Doors plan be amended. Acting on the workgroup recommendations, the Council amended Opening Doors in September 2012 to include new strategies to prevent and end youth homelessness.

All of this work is intended as the necessary preamble to organize ourselves to prevent and end youth homelessness. Once we know what works for different groups of youth experiencing homelessness, we can scale up what works and reduce interventions that are less effective.

What are we doing now? 

Earlier today, USICH released the Framework to End Youth Homelessness, a resource for communities and States, which you can find on our website at usich.gov. The Framework is more detailed than the Plan amendment that was issued last September.

The Youth Framework calls on the Federal government working with communities, agencies and systems at all levels to work together on a strategic approach to getting to better youth outcomes in stable housing, permanent connections, education, employment, and wellbeing. 

The Framework involves two complementary and concurrent strategies: getting to better data on youth homelessness, and building capacity for service-delivery system to end youth homelessness.  

At the Federal level, we are taking a number of steps to improve our data on youth.  Most significantly, HUD revised the PIT data tables for the 2013 Count.  This means that for the first time we will have national data from every community about the number of youth up to age 24 who were counted.  Previously youth were grouped in with adults up to age 30.

This year we also launched the Youth Count! Initiative, a study to identify strategies used to reach unaccompanied homeless youth and to assess promising practices and interesting challenges to implementing a youth-targeted count. Nine study sites participated, including Seattle and Washington State. The early reports show that by involving youth and youth providers, better counts are possible, but it’s still tough to enumerate and survey youth.

HUD and HHS, with support from USICH, have been working to integrate HHS’ youth data system, RHYMIS, with HUD’s homeless data system, HMIS. This will improve these data systems by making them work better for youth-serving agencies while painting a clearer picture of young people touched by federally-funded services across agencies. 

The next steps to appear publicly will occur as HUD issues the new HMIS data standard. In the meantime, HUD, HHS, and USICH are actively engaged on the details of the integration.

These data steps can also pave the way for a new National Prevalence Study focused on youth experiencing homelessness. Stay tuned…

The Council is also working with local communities that are interested in adopting the Youth Framework’s preliminary intervention model. We are collecting and sharing tools that can identify risk and protective factors to help providers determine the type and level of intervention needed to improve outcomes for youth.  

A systems model for homeless youth is a new approach to the provider community for how they think about front-end assessment for youth experiencing homelessness and connections to the most effective services. Some communities, like Minneapolis, Portland, Boston, and Los Angeles are already beginning to organize their services systematically around addressing the needs of youth and testing screening and assessment tools that include risk and protective factors. Please let us know if your community is planning for how the intervention model can be applied to your community.

Even if your community hasn’t yet embraced the preliminary intervention model and a systems approach for youth, at a minimum, create stronger collaborations between systems that work with youth, including HHS’ Runaway and Homeless Youth providers, HUD’s CoC system and providers, and Education’s homeless liaisons. Our Federal partners have encouraged their grantees to reach across the silos of child welfare, public education, and juvenile and adult justice to integrate their efforts with community-driven approaches to youth homelessness.

What will it take to end youth homelessness?

Ending youth homelessness will take all of us working together – aligned in our approach and our advocacy. We will only meet our shared goal of preventing and ending youth homelessness by 2020 if we build the evidence of what works, identify the gaps and the resources that are needed, then build an effective case to attain those resources to fill the gap. Only by working together can we build a smart case and the solutions necessary to end youth homelessness. 

On behalf of President Obama and this administration, thank you for your hard and necessary work.  As he said in his State of the Union Address last week, “we need to build ladders of opportunity...” Together, we can make sure that homelessness will never stop a young person in this country from reaching that first wrung.  Together, it’s possible to end the national crisis of youth homelessness and ensure that everyone has a safe and stable place to call home.  Thank You. 

The pins on your collar say:  I am Home For Good.  I feel that way when I am in Los Angeles; as you might know, I consider LA to be my third home along with DC and Columbus.

Frankly, I didn’t always feel that way.  We all know the problems of the past, the lack of a unified vision for change, the idea the LA was just too big, too segmented to work together.

Still, the fact that making progress in Los Angeles is absolutely critical to the national effort to prevent and end homelessness was as true then as it is now. Los Angeles has to be the place we can point other communities to and say: This is how you solve homelessness.This is how you strategically align goals and collaborate, and use resources effectively and push them toward quality providers; this is how you create tools to measure success. Simply put, Los Angeles hasto be the home for our best practices. Two years ago, I wasn’t sure that was possible.

But when the Obama Administration launched Opening Doors, the first ever federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness, Home For Good was there to adopt this vision alongside the federal government. 

Los Angeles started to collaborate. Partnerships grew out of the Collaborative Leadership Summit and out of efforts to get Veterans off the streets and into housing using the HUD VASH program, both of which are paying huge dividends to our cause. The awards being announced here today signal further evidence that collaboration works in LA. Let’s keep it working.

Yes, solving homelessness requires resources. Just since my visit in February, HUD and VA awarded a record 800 new HUD-VASH housing vouchers to LA, worth over seven million dollars. VA announced nearly one million dollars in Supportive Services to Veterans Family grants to the area, and HUD gave close to 100 million dollars for supportive housing through the Continuum of Care competition, including fourteen million dollars for nine new projects. The Corporation of National and Community Service through CSH awarded the Economic Roundtable with a highly competitive, five-year annual grant of $375,000 that will help build a model of supportive housing linked to health services that saves public dollars and improves the lives of vulnerable men and women.

The charge is placed before this community to continue to use resources strategically and continue to achieve better outcomes.  You must look to unlock more mainstream resources and identify more new local private and public funding.

I want to thank and congratulate the City and County Housing Authorities, the Los Angeles Housing Department, and the County Departments of Mental Health, Health Services, and Public Health for their dedication and creativity in bringing resources to the table today.

I want to thank the private sector partners who dedicate their resources and serve as flexible, efficient partners to leverage public resources. The leadership of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation is particularly commendable. 

Resources have to have quality providers and programs to support.  And today, we honor 25 providers who have demonstrated their effectiveness and commitment to the goals we’ve set forward.

To you, I say, keep expanding capacity; keep transforming outdated models, and keep evolving your network into a true system of care for each individual who is now on the streets or in shelter.

And hats off to Home for Good, Hilton Foundation, and the County for your commitment to better performance measurement systems. You’re almost there. Soon, we can point to Los Angeles as an example of how to use data transformation ally. 

Today, we celebrate the Home For Good initiative and the Funders Collaborative.These awards represent incredible signs of progress toward aligning public and private sector resources.

To any potential partners, collaborators, or funders here who have not yet come to the table, please use today as your inspiration to join us.  The need is evident all around us – you have a chance to make a real difference by joining the Funders Collaborative.

The US Interagency Council is committed to partnering with everyone in this room. We recognize Los Angeles as a home for solutions, a home for best practices, and a home for collaboration where the goal is clear and singular:  no one should experience homelessness;no one should be without a safe, stable place to call home. 

Los Angeles is a Home for All.

On behalf of President Obama and Council Chair, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, thank you for all of the hard work you do, day after day to make Los Angeles – and this country - a better place. 

USICH's Barbara Poppe and Joshua Leopold, along with Joyce Probst-McAlpine of Dayton, OH and Greg Shinn of Tulsa, OK presented the session Chronic Homelessness: Getting to Zero by 2015 at the 2012 National Alliance to End Homelessness Annual Conference. USICH presented an analysis of chronic homelessness, which includes potential factors that may be slowing progress on ending chronic homelessness and what is needed to accelerate progress moving forward. The session also featured two communities that have made significant progress in ending chronic homelessness - Dayton, OH and Tulsa, OK - and how they have been able to move the needle on chronic homelessness in their communities using innovative and effective approaches. 

Access the slideset

USICH Regional Coordinators Matthew Doherty and Michael DeVos were joined by Bill Block of King County, Washington, and Alicia Woodsby of the Partnership for Strong Communities in Connecticut to present a session on the benefits of aligning community plans with Opening Doors. The Opening Doors Across America campaign was discussed as a framework for beginning the process of revamping community plans, and two community experiences were presented as examples to follow in this effort. For the entire presentation, please download the document from the box on the right.

USICH Regional Coordinators presented this session on State Interagency Councils on Homelessness as a preconference workshop for the National Alliance to End Homelessness' 2012 Annual Conference on July 16, 2012. This presentatation explored techniques that establish and strengthen the work of state and local Interagency councils through engagement, collaboration, and goals clarification. This presentation was given in a World Cafe discussion style and the second half of the presentation includes the discussion questions used for state leaders in this session. Resources on SICH establishment are also included. For the entire presentation, please download the document from the box on the right.

USICH Executive Director Barbara Poppe presented a workshop to NLIHC Annual Conference recipients entitled, "Life After HPRP." This workshop detailed lessons learned from the success of HPRP, how the tenets of HPRP are now included in the new Emergency Solutions Grant program at HUD, the importance of improving a community's crisis response system, and how best to fund rapid re-housing and other successful programs for those experiencing a housing crisis. For the entire presentation, please download the slideshow from the box on the right.

New Orleans, LA

Good afternoon. It is terrific to see so many friends and colleagues gathered together. Thanks Bill for that very generous introduction and all you’ve done to further Housing First across the country and especially in Los Angeles.I also want to thank Bill and Sam Tsemberis for creating the vision and then hosting this historic conference. It’s an honor to precede Assistant Secretary Mercedes Marquez who has been such an exceptional leader on supportive housing at HUD, as well as a Housing First pioneer in her hometown of Los Angeles.

Two years ago, with the help of many of you, we launched Opening Doors. The first ever comprehensive federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness builds upon and leverages the innovative efforts underway in communities across the country. Many of these efforts are showcased in the impressive array of workshops that have been put together for this conference.

There are four goals in Opening Doors, but most significantly, for today’s purposes, I want to focus on our work together to finish the job of ending chronic homelessness by 2015.

Opening Doors calls out that permanent supportive housing implemented by using Housing First principles is the primary solution to end chronic homelessness. The Plan highlights key strategies to increase the availability of housing and supportive services. Taking permanent supportive housing to the scale necessary to end homelessness requires a deep understanding of the population of people experiencing chronic homelessness. 

Fortunately, there are new and promising practices to better inform communities about the types of services and housing interventions that are needed. The 100,000 Homes Vulnerability Index survey based on Jim O'Connell's research or DESC's Vulnerability Assessment Tool are good examples of assessment tools.

Equipped with this information, communities can map the mainstream and targeted housing programs that exist in your community that can be brought to bear on these needs, and identify the gaps then create alignment to form a system of care. Supportive housing at a scale sufficient to meet the housing needs of the most vulnerable is the centerpiece of a community strategy to end chronic homelessness.

The key supporting strategies are integrating primary and behavioral health care services and increasing access to mainstream programs. We also need to stop the flow from publicly supported institutions that discharge to homelessness – hospitals, jails, and prisons. The final key ingredient is leadership.

For those with serious mental illness, chronic addiction, and traumatic brain injury, integration of primary and behavioral health care not only gets better results, it is also a promising practice to reduce overall health care costs. When you think about the people you work with who have multiple health conditions, say schizophrenia and diabetes or depression and heart disease, you just cannot deal with one without knowing something about what’s going on with the other.When we hosted a group of people doing integrated care in Baltimore with the Center for Medicaid back in the fall of 2010, one of the providers said it best, “We started doing this because our clients led us there.”
 
We know that when care is practiced in silos, people with mental illness do not get preventive health care, they do not get good care for chronic medical conditions, and they do not get good dental care. As a result, people with mental illness will die 25 years earlier than others, largely from medical conditions that went untreated.

Helping supportive housing tenants to access disability benefits whether through the VA, Social Security Administration, or state programs will increase their economic security and housing stability. Adoption of SOAR practices has been shown to expedite and increase to SSI/SSDI and other benefits.

One of the most important mainstream programs that chronically homeless people need to access is Medicaid. The Affordable Care Act provides tremendous lift to our work in ending chronic homelessness through vehicles such as Medicaid expansion and Health Homes.  Right here, the state of Louisiana is building permanent supportive housing into its behavioral health managed care contract. We are cheering for your success. Other great efforts are happening in New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Los Angeles.

To take this to scale, States will need to re-design their Medicaid plans to pay for some services that are part of the Housing First approach - AND - supportive housing providers  will need to  either partner with organizations that can provide Medicaid eligible services or transform their agency to become a provider of Medicaid eligible services.

To stem the flow of individuals from jails and prisons into homeless services systems, public institutions working alongside community based and mainstream organizations need to align efforts to provide housing stabilization and supports to men and women who are re-entering the community. 

In order to improve chances of keeping the most vulnerable individual from experiencing homelessness, permanent supportive or affordable housing along with the right mix of services is believed to be the best response for those with prior histories of homelessness.  While resources are scarce, we need to be as creative as ever and use these precious resources wisely while balancing with the housing needs of those already homelessness on the streets or in shelters.

The final key ingredient is Leadership. Change is difficult.  Breaking down the silos and working collaboratively requires commitment. Interdisciplinary, interagency, and intergovernmental action is required to effectively create comprehensive responses to the complex problem of homelessness.  We have seen this type of transformation in HUD-VASH as a result of the leadership by VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.  

As the business experts would note, this is an adaptive, not a technical problem. So participatory leadership is required.

• We need to build broad support for Housing First in every community, organize a community response, and then hold each other accountable for achieving the results. 
• It will take leadership to be sure that permanent supportive housing is truly targeted to those who are most vulnerable, most in need of it.
• It takes leadership to address NIMBY and build allies rather than opponents. It takes collaborative leadership to prioritize and align resources.

So back to our primary solution – Housing First permanent supportive housing. If it’s a proven and cost effective solution, then why aren’t we at scale? 

First there are considerable challenges in assembling the financing and funding sufficient to make your projects work. Expertise in everything from Low Income Housing Tax Credits to the Federal Home Loan Bank to Housing Choice Voucher to Medicaid is required to bring together the resources for development, operations, and services.

As if the financing weren’t complex enough the rest is equally challenging.  Here’s my running list of clinical practices that are useful to know: ACT team, Critical Time Intervention, Harm reduction, IDDT, Motivational interviewing, Peer support, SOAR, and Trauma informed care. 

And to make a Housing First program work you’ve got to ensure all these service needs are met:  Outreach and engagement, case management, care coordination – health care access, housing retention, benefits acquisition, financial management/payee services, treatment, family reunification, employment and vocational services.

To be successful you need to cultivate myriad relationships from the CoC and other homeless providers to Public Housing Agencies, VA, community mental health centers, Federally Qualified Health Centers to name a few. 

And then you also need to pay attention to community building within program and into the community, manage data collection and evaluation, be effective in public advocacy and education, of course be exceptional in administration…from compliance to staff training to accounting. And too often you have to deal with NIMBY and those who don’t believe in harm reduction and housing first.

Super powers are needed just to understand every acronym let alone to master everything you need to pull off a successful project. You are my super heroes for taking on this challenge. I want to applaud each of you in this room for stepping up and into this great mission.

Given the immense complexities of this work, it’s really no wonder that we sometimes get lost among the trees and can’t tell the story of how we end chronic homelessness in ways the ordinary person can understand. To create the political will this movement needs, we must be able to convince the American public that it’s possible to end chronic homelessness. We cannot only afford to end it but that we can’t afford not to.

Home for Good in Los Angeles has just created a PSA to break it down in a clear and compelling story.

Let's take a moment to watch it:

Our window of opportunity is now. We all need to be aligned and pushing harder. Harder than we thought when we all signed up for this. We won’t be able to achieve these goals without you.

On behalf of President Obama and Council Chair, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, thank you for all of the hard work you do and for being our partner in this mission.

Los Angeles, California

Two years ago, I stood here and shared with you a few thoughts on where we were headed with the first ever federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.

With your help, we launched Opening Doors at the White House with Cabinet Secretaries, the head of the Domestic Policy Council, and Members of Congress. In big bright lights the federal government committed to preventing and ending family, youth, and children homelessness by 2020.

Opening Doors has stimulated unprecedented collaboration across federal agencies. We’ve seen the adoption of best practices by federal agencies and continued progress in communities across the nation.

I’m especially proud that ending homelessness remains a priority for the Administration -   five Cabinet Secretaries are engaged - including for the first time an Education Secretary thanks to Secretary Arne Duncan.

We have also had some bi-partisan Congressional support, which is certainly a result of the tremendous efforts of many of you in this audience.

The Recovery Act has helped save over 1.2 million people from homelessness through your work to implement HPRP. This is a tremendous feat.

In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, we saw a drop in Veterans experiencing homelessness by nearly 12 percent and we’ve seen an overall 2.1 percent decline among all populations.

And just this past week, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.3% and on Friday the President announced a new Veterans Job Corps initiative. The Administration’s new veteran employment initiatives, coupled with the work that President Obama has already accomplished in creating employment opportunities for veterans, will put tens of thousands of veterans back to work.

Earlier this week, we heard the exciting news that the President has again requested one billion dollars to fund the National Housing Trust Fund in Fiscal Year 13. 

Despite this progress, there is still so much more work ahead of us.

When it comes to family homelessness, the solutions are known. We need to focus on prevention and rapid re-housing. This includes optimizing access to affordable housing not spending scarce resources on long shelter and transitional housing stays.

HEARTH implementation is absolutely vital. One of the core elements that is critical for families is a coordinated community system that focuses on prevention and diversion, with shelter admission as a last resort. Across the nation, quicker exits from shelter and transitional programs into permanent housing need to become the norm.

Local communities must accommodate all types of families – two parent, LGBT parents, families with teenagers, multi-generational families. It is unacceptable for any child, youth, or parent to be left on our streets. 

Since 2009, we’ve learned a tremendous amount from HPRP. Strategic prevention works.  More importantly communities that focused their HPRP dollars on rapid rehousing clearly achieved a much more significant impact - getting families out of shelter as quickly as possible. Going forward, we need a laser-like focus on this. Expensive, intensive, interventions for families need to be reserved and available to those who need it most. 

I promise, you are not the only ones who are worried about HPRP coming to an end. Communities will need to become more creative by utilizing federal funding through HUD’s re-designed Emergency Solutions Grant and VA’s new Supportive Services for Veterans Families program.

When it comes to youth, we can all agree that we need a better understanding of the size and scope of the need. Of even greater importance is that we need a better understanding about what works and what doesn’t for the sub-populations among youth experiencing homelessness.

This isn’t an excuse for inaction -- too many homeless youth – in nearly every community - are not well served.

USICH’s Deputy Director Jennifer Ho and I are working together to create momentum on this issue. We so appreciate those of you in this room that have been resources to help us better understand needs, barriers, and solutions. Thanks for speaking up.

Just this past December, the Council meeting focused on youth homelessness for the first time. The Cabinet Secretaries told us loud and clear - they want action.

We are now facilitating an unprecedented dialogue among agencies to determine the most strategic actions we can take right now. Your insights and input are encouraged and welcomed.

Reflecting back on where we were two years ago, I am proud of the work we all have accomplished together.  But there is so much more that needs to be done. We need your continued creativity, energy, and focus now more than ever.

I have three requests.

One, we need your help to secure resources. Not just in Washington, but at the state and local levels as well. How can we work together to make the case that we need more affordable housing? More resources for youth?

Second, promote best practices and help with implementation of Opening Doors in the field. Commit to doing what works. That’s what Opening Doors is all about. We must better target resources to provide the right intervention at the right time to the youth or family at risk of or experiencing homelessness.

Third, sign on to our call to action – known as Opening Doors Across America.   This campaign will demonstrate that across the country there is commitment to achieving the vision of ending homelessness for families, youth, children, those experiencing chronic homeless and Veterans. Opening Doors lays out the road map and makes the case for the resources that are needed to achieve the vision.

To sign on, we ask you to demonstrate four commitments.

1. Align your community or state plan with Opening Doors.
2. Commit to incremental targets and measure your progress toward the goals of Opening Doors.
3. Act strategically: collaborate, invest, and act on strategies that are proven to make an impact.
4. Partner with us. Keep lines of communication open with public officials at all levels to share what you are doing and learning.

Can I see a show of hands from folks who like Connecticut, Kentucky, Philadelphia, Seattle, Fresno, and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania have signed on to or are working to sign on to Opening Doors Across America?

Thank you for your support and leadership.

At your urging, the Obama administration set out a bold vision two years ago – end Veterans and chronic homelessness by 2015 and end family, youth, and child homelessness by 2020. The window of opportunity is now. We all need to be aligned and pushing harder. Harder than we thought when we all signed up for this. We won’t be able to achieve these goals without you.

On behalf of President Obama and Council Chair, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, thank you for all of the hard work you do, day after day to make this country a better place for all of us.

Hearing on "H.R.32, the Homeless Children and Youth Act of 2011: Proposals to Promote Economic Independence for Homeless Children and Youth."

Washington, DC

Good morning. Chairman Biggert, Ranking Member Gutierrez, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify about the impact of homelessness on children and youth.

I want to thank Chairman Biggert for her leadership on the passage of the HEARTH Act. Today we are here to discuss three requirements in that Act: a change in HUD’s homeless definition, a GAO study of federal definitions, and the development of a federal plan. I am pleased to report that we have made progress on all three. HUD’s new definition reflects the agreement that was reached in the HEARTH Act. And we have followed up on the GAO study to advance federal work on a common vocabulary. And as you know, we have the first ever federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.

It is horrifying in a nation as wealthy as ours that nearly one million school children experience homelessness. The testimony we have just heard underscores this tragedy.

As Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Johnston has noted, the latest HUD data shows that nearly 240,000 family members experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2011.
While the 2011 Point-in-Time count was less than the 2010 count, other trends are not positive.  There is a significant mismatch between income and housing. More families are experiencing foreclosure. The shrinking affordable housing stock, falling household incomes, and increased competition from higher-income renters have widened the gap between the number of low-income renters and the number of affordable units.

The needs of families, youth, and children vary, and often require not only housing and employment, but also attention to education, health care and other needs. These operate out of different silos at a local level, often managed by different jurisdictions. Instead of a tailored and holistic response, families and youth confront a highly fragmented, uncoordinated set of services that they are usually left to navigate on their own.

Not only is this tragic for homeless families, there is a growing body of evidence that repeated housing instability is costly to public systems.

The good news is there are solutions. Investing in more housing assistance now can save money over the long term for schools, child welfare, the health care system, and other public institutions.

In June 2010, the Obama administration acted. For the first time, the federal government set a goal to end family, youth, and child homelessness by 2020. Opening Doors is based on a growing body of evidence that shows how targeted comprehensive solutions are more cost effective than temporary fixes. 

Affordable housing is the cornerstone of any effort to reduce and ultimately end homelessness. The preservation and expansion of affordable housing through rehabilitation, new construction, and rental assistance is critical to ending family homelessness.

Unfortunately, the trend lines for affordable housing are going in the wrong direction. Too many Americans cannot afford a safe place to call home. Despite the growing need, housing assistance programs are threatened at all levels of government in the current budget environment.

Next to more affordable housing, prevention is also critical.  Targeted interventions that keep families from losing a home in the first place spare children the trauma of homelessness, absences from class or changes in schools. The key drivers are access to affordable housing, financial assistance and support during a crisis.

Another proven solution is rapid re-housing. Short-term assistance helps families quickly move out of homelessness and into permanent housing. HPRP made an enormous impact around the country and helped many communities shift to cost-effective programs focusing on prevention and rapid re-housing.     

Housing stability over the long term requires the right types of supports provided in a highly coordinated way. These include good health care, education, transportation, childcare, and a job that pays enough to meet household needs.

Federal collaboration is moving from silos to solutions that connect these systems to prevent homelessness whenever possible and when it does happen, to resolve it as quickly as possible. That is work we are doing across federal agencies. So too this needs to occur in every state and community across the nation.

What gets measured gets done. This Administration has improved data collection, analysis, and reporting. Agencies within HHS and the VA are coordinating with HUD on these efforts.

Our nation has faced economic uncertainties during the first 18 months of Opening Doors’ implementation, but one thing remains clear: homelessness is an urgent problem – not only is it devastating to families and individuals who experience it, but it is very costly to society as a whole.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress and across the country have collaborated for decades to fight homelessness. Family, youth, and child homelessness is an outrage that should know no partisan boundaries and is an area where we can make a real difference - together. We need to invest in what works. We need to invest in our future our children.

Let us work together to ensure that by 2020 not a single American child or youth experiences homelessness. Thank you again for this opportunity to testify. I look forward to your questions.

Read Barbara Poppe's written testimony