The following is a release form the King County Council.
In collaboration with local governments, human service agencies and faith communities, King County continues working to prevent and end homelessness.
The Metropolitan King County Council confirmed the county’s commitment to that goal with its support of the 2015-2019 Strategic Plan of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County.
“The strategic plan provides a path to make homelessness rare and brief,” said Councilman Dave Upthegrove, chair of the Council’s Health, Housing and Human Services Committee. “With poverty on the rise and a growing gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in our community, we need to stay focused on making sure that everyone has a place to call home.”
At the start of the century, King County joined seven other entities in the formation of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County (CEH) a unified approach to address the region’s homelessness crisis.
In 2005, the committee adopted a 10-year plan to end homelessness and worked to develop an infrastructure that focused on homeless services, housing and the effort to prevent and end homelessness.
Since the establishment of the plan, CEH has helped fund 6,314 new units of permanent housing with supportive services, for a countywide total of 8,337 units.
In addition, CEH supports 2,807 emergency shelter units, 1,760 transitional housing units and 484 rapid re-housing units.
CEH also helps to coordinate the allocation of federal, state, local and philanthropic funds to housing, supportive services and crisis response, allocating a total of $42.14 million to crisis response, $116.77 million to household stabilization and $23.1 million to services in 2014.
The adopted legislation builds upon the 10-year plan in the development of a strategic plan that seeks to end:
• veteran homelessness by the end of 2015
• chronic homelessness by 2017
• family and young adult homelessness by 2020
• single adult homelessness.
The CEH’s Strategic plan will focus on three goals:
• Make homelessness rare by addressing the causes of homelessness through action at all levels of government. CEH intends to accomplish this through prevention resources in communities where the need and opportunity are greatest, and working for the preservation and expansion of housing for people at risk of homelessness.
• Make homelessness brief and one-time by ensuring that people who experience homelessness quickly receive the right services and that more people are served with existing programs. CEH will accomplish this through a series of options including: a coordinated assessment system to match people with housing, to supporting partnerships between behavioral health and social service providers, neighborhood associations, and local government and creating employment and education opportunities to support stability.
• Develop a Community to End Homelessness because solving homelessness will take more than a Committee. CEH will build that community through a public awareness and engagement campaign, engaging local governments, philanthropic organizations, and community partners, establishing a business leaders’ task force, and expanding its effort to engage faith communities.
