Executive Director Barbara Poppe at the Home for Good Funders Collaborative Press Event
8/17/12
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.
