VA Homeless Programs
Message from Monica Diaz, Executive Director, VHA Homeless Programs Office
August 2024
If homelessness was easy to solve, there wouldn’t be a single Veteran without a roof over their head. But it’s complex, and complex issues require creativity and all hands on deck.
It’s been nearly five months since we implemented our all hands on deck approach: One Team. We’re already seeing success, with the pace of housing Veterans picking up and the rate of Veterans re-entering homelessness beginning to drop.
As the name suggests, cohesiveness is a key component of One Team. It focuses on working together as a unit to provide Veterans facing homelessness with a seamless web of support rather than disconnected threads provided by different programs, services, and partners.
No matter how Veterans connect with us, we want them to find a coordinated process that allows us to develop a holistic, tailored housing and service plan centered on their personal choices.
Another key component—which may seem less obvious—is flexibility. If one program isn’t a good fit, we pivot to another. If no social workers are available to rapidly rehouse a Veteran, we deploy someone from another program.
This flexibility is particularly pivotal given the changing national landscape of homelessness, and supporting Veterans living in encampments is becoming a major focus for us in VA.
We’ve developed a response plan that uses the fundamentals of One Team to locate Veterans living in encampments and provide them with same-day access to housing, connect them with the services they need to maintain permanent housing, and prevent them from entering the criminal legal system.
On the national level, we’re keeping close tabs on encampments and pending closures, and we’ve established a response team to swiftly organize help for VA medical centers that are responding to encampment closures.
We encourage local medical centers to pull together resources from across their homeless programs and services so they can quickly leap into action, while keeping to our One Team philosophy by coordinating with existing community outreach teams to align resources, increase efficiency, and avoid duplication.
We know that no matter how complex the problem of homelessness and how many hurdles are thrown in our way, our mission remains the same: to end Veteran homelessness in America.
I believe that with the strength of our united team, we will be ready to help any Veteran facing homelessness in any community throughout the country.
