100,000 Homes Campaign: Solving the Public Health Crisis of Homelessness

In July 2010, Common Ground, along with many national partners, launched the 100,000 Homes Campaign to bring together change agents across the country to end the public health crisis of chronic homelessness within 3 years. The foundation of this work is the detailed registry of people living on the streets or in shelters created at the community level; aggregated information gives us an emerging picture of the experience of homelessness. Our knowledge of the illness burden carried by community members experiencing homelessness is crisp, stark and compels us to action.

Campaign communities use this applied research to understand the urgent health and housing needs of the most vulnerable community members. We use our website, webinar series and conference presentations to illustrate promising practices and foster replication of these practices across the country, and we offer technical assistance to Campaign communities to foster improvements in health and housing outcomes. Together, we are creating relevant outcome measures to demonstrate improved health among people experiencing homelessness, their improved experience of the care systems, and decreased healthcare costs.

We will outline the progress made by campaign communities to date, highlighting the number of people who are now living in permanent housing as a result. We will describe how communities translate information on health and housing needs into actionable steps to match the most vulnerable with housing and services and will review key successes. Finally, we will highlight innovations in community-based approaches to coordinated health and housing.