Atlas Research has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans to support VA staff and community providers in facilitating permanent housing placement for all homeless Veterans in twenty-five major U.S. cities.
Under the contract, Atlas will work with VA to guide communities through a rapid process to develop a coordinated assessment and housing system and build standardized management. The approach is both data and community-driven. The team will identify resources and barriers to the successful placement of homeless Veterans, and assist the community and VA in prioritizing the need for housing and other services for Veterans who are chronically homeless, homeless, and those at risk for homelessness. They will work with each community to track progress toward ending Veteran homelessness at the local level.
Among the central goals of the project is to ensure that each participating community can connect the ongoing work of various local agencies and organizations into a single, well-functioning housing placement system through which all Veterans can access housing. To that end, the project will focus on helping communities redesign their local service systems to ensure that they can identify all homeless Veterans needing housing, determine the most appropriate housing option for each Veteran, and reliably connect Veterans to those options in as little time as possible.
The work will draw heavily on the prior success of Community Solutions and the Rapid Results Institute, which have already helped many U.S. cities double and even triple the rate at which they are housing homeless Veterans, often within 100 days.
“We are honored to be a part of this project as one of the key strategies to end the cycle of homelessness for Veterans altogether,” said Jamie Hart, Atlas Executive Vice President. “We look forward to working with VA and community service providers on this tremendously valuable project.”
Project partners include Community Solutions and Rapid Results Institute. Both organizations bring to the project valuable experience and expertise in working with communities to tackle the issues of Veteran homelessness through a rapid, comprehensive, and community empowered approach.