What Does Ending Homelessness Mean?

June 04, 2018

An end to homelessness means that every community will have a comprehensive response in place that ensures homelessness is prevented whenever possible, or if it can’t be prevented, it is a rare, brief, and one-time experience.

Specifically, every community will have the capacity to:

Quickly identify and engage people at risk of and experiencing homelessness.
Intervene to prevent people from losing their housing and divert people from entering the homelessness services system.
Provide people with immediate access to shelter and crisis services without barriers to entry if homelessness does occur.
Quickly connect people experiencing homelessness to housing assistance and services tailored to their unique needs and strengths to help them achieve and maintain stable housing.

Criteria and Benchmarks

USICH and our member agencies have developed specific criteria and benchmarks in order to help guide communities as they take action. Criteria represent the essential elements of a community’s response, while benchmarks serve as measurements that a community can use to evaluate its overall effectiveness.