Community Plan to End Homelessness

Overview

The Community Plan to End Homelessness is BRACH’s three-year strategic plan to guide the broad system of care in responding to and reducing homelessness.

The strategies and goals of this plan are intended to provide focus, support, and a path for our community’s homeless service system to follow in its work to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring.

The current plan is a result of an evaluation and update process that includes the original seven Guiding Principles with new action steps, Annual System Performance Goals, and Annual Built For Zero Performance Goals. 

In preparation for the most recent update of the Community Plan in 2018, BRACH conducted a series of input sessions, interviews, and opportunities for feedback with the following groups:  

• Persons experiencing homelessness  
• Service Provider Council  
• Downtown Business Association  
• Stakeholders from the counties of Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson  
• Interested members from the community

Main Themes

The main themes that emerged from the feedback we received were the following:

• The most important barriers to overcome to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring:  
  • The overall lack of affordable housing  
  • Limited economic opportunities for households to increase their income  
  • Limited supportive services, especially mental health and/or substance use services
• The most helpful resources for people experiencing homelessness that want access to affordable housing and gainful employment:
  • Rental assistance and security deposit assistance  
  • Affordable housing navigation  
  • Employment assistance
  • The 40 individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness who provided input almost unanimously (85%) cited attaining affordable housing as an important personal goal and nearly half (48%) cited attaining gainful employment or increasing their income as an important goal. 
• The Guiding Principles of the plan are all still valid and should continue to be the  foundation of our work, but they have only been met satisfactorily. There is a need for new strategies and updated efforts to incorporate these principles into our work in more meaningful ways  
• More focus should be placed on community education about homelessness. Data and stories should be made more accessible, especially those that highlight successful programming and outcomes.

Guiding Principles

1. Focus on serving hardest to serve/highest risk homeless population
2. Adopt and implement Housing First strategies
3. Use best practice approaches where possible
4. Make decisions based on data
5. Advocate for the availability of effective community support services outside the homelessness system of care
6. Increase housing options for the very poor and people with barriers
7. Provide strong leadership with focus on funding and advocacy activities

Annual System Performance Goals

1. Reduce overall homelessness  
2. Reduce the amount of time people remain homeless  
3. Increase the number of people exiting homeless service programs to permanent housing
4. Reduce returns to homelessness  
5. Increase the number of people engaged in homeless services who increase their income

Annual Built for Zero Performance Goals

1. Achieve a quality, real-time By-Name List of all people experiencing homelessness
2. Maintain and update the By-Name List regularly
3. Achieve a functional end of Veteran Homelessness  
4. Achieve a functional end of Chronic Homelessness

Appendix

Health and Homelessness in the TJACH [BRACH] Service Area

Prepared by Jacqueline Carson, UVa School of Medicine Student

Using self-reported data collected in the VI-SPDAT, the demographics of 204 individuals and 22 families experiencing homelessness in the greater Charlottesville area were analyzed with the intersection of health and homelessness at the focus. The report highlights the depth of chronic health conditions in the homeless population.