United States Interagency Council On Homelessness - Opening Doors

Opening Doors

It is estimated that 640,000 women and men are without shelter each night in the United States. Mandated by Congress under the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act of 2009, USICH was tasked to create a national strategic plan to end homelessness which will be updated periodically to reflect progress and changing priorities. As a result, Opening Doors was drafted and serves as the nation’s first comprehensive national strategy for ending homelessness.

This strategic plan, entitled Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, was presented on June 22, 2010 to President Obama’s staff and members of Congress. The plan was created to help strengthen existing programs geared towards addressing the issues of homelessness and works to create partnerships with not only existing programs, but forge new ones in the effort to help the nation. The strategy also presents cost-effective strategies for states, local and the federal government.

"Opening Doors" serves as a roadmap for joint action by the 19 federal agencies of USICH, along with state and local partners in both the private and public sectors. In the process of developing this comprehensive plan, USICH held stakeholder meetings, work group meetings to focus on statistics of the population pertaining to this issue, held expert panels, and sought public comment through an online website.

Aside from the plan’s four main goals listed above, objectives were created around five main themes in order to specify how the strategy will work to address the issue of homelessness. The themes include the following:

Increase leadership, collaboration, and civic engagement

• Objective 1: Provide and promote collaborative leadership at all levels of government and across all sectors to inspire and energize Americans to commit to preventing and ending homelessness.
• Objective 2: Strengthen the capacity of public and private organizations by increasing knowledge about collaboration, homelessness, and successful interventions to prevent and end homelessness.

Increase access to stable and affordable housing

• Objective 3: Provide affordable housing to people experiencing or most at risk of homelessness.
• Objective 4: Provide permanent supportive housing to prevent and end chronic homelessness.

Increase economic security

• Objective 5: Increase meaningful and sustainable employment for people experiencing or most at risk of homelessness.
• Objective 6: Improve access to mainstream programs and services to reduce people’s financial vulnerability to homelessness.

Improve health and stability

• Objective 7: Integrate primary and behavioral health care services with homeless assistance programs and housing to reduce people’s vulnerability to and the impacts of homelessness.
• Objective 8: Advance health and housing stability for youth aging out of systems such as foster care and juvenile justice.
• Objective 9: Advance health and housing stability for people experiencing homelessness who have frequent contact with hospitals and criminal justice.

Retool the Homeless Crisis Response System

• Objective 10: Transform homeless services to crisis response systems that prevent homelessness and rapidly return people who experience homelessness.