Seeking out and developing relationships
Not long into our journey as a transitional residence for homeless veterans, we began to get a clearer picture of the facets which make up the over-arching needs for them and the homeless population in general. A housing model for single adult men was a great place to start, because that demographic makes up most of the homeless population that we and our veteran partner agencies were encountering. But inevitably we encountered female homeless veterans as well and learned that there were even some homeless families found in the area from time to time, in which one of the adults was a veteran. With these encounters less frequent, we still wanted to be available as a solution to them and began to imagine what that might look lie beyond our existing five-bed, single male homeless veteran model.
Those ideas and discussions led us to seek out and develop relationships over time with property owners and landlords who had some rental inventory and were interested in availing themselves to considering homeless veterans when they had vacancies. In January of this year one of those relationships became fruitful and allowed us to lease the residence right next door to our existing property, which has two apartments of 2 bedrooms each. This increased our transitional capacity to nine beds.
While adding these as program beds to our existing model and expanding into them seamlessly with single adult male veterans, we also took the unique opportunity to house a veteran family of four, who we had been helping search for suitable housing while they were residing in a local hotel. This is a paradigm shift in our program, and we are excited to have the flexibility to be able to do this.
As we grow accustomed to this expansion, our sights remain high to further increase our impact to house homeless veteran men, women and families with similar opportunities.
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