A Home For All: How Did We Get Here?

A HOME FOR ALL STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK & IMPLEMENTATION PLAN

In April 2021, Charlotte-Mecklenburg came together to address concerning local trends in affordable housing and homelessness. This 18-month community engagement effort consisted of input from hundreds of diverse stakeholders and resulted in the A Home For All Strategic Framework, a first-ever comprehensive framework to address homelessness and housing instability– spanning the continuum from shelter beds to affordable homeownership. This effort created important momentum and focus on the issue of homelessness and housing instability in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area.

In October 2022, led by United Way and facilitated by HR&A Advisors, Inc., the community came together again to develop the Framework implementation plan and to identify which of the strategies to move forward first. The full process took place over nine months and involved consultation with more than 150 individuals and organizations. A key centerpiece of the engagement was the convening the Technical Committee. The committee, comprised of subject matter experts with professional and lived expertise, provided insight into what supportive services are required, how services should be offered, and how to meet the current demand for all forms of shelter and housing. Committee members began with the 99 initiatives laid out in the Strategic Framework and identified nine near-term priority initiatives.

These innovative initiatives address the full continuum of housing instability and homelessness and will help achieve our goal of a community where homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring, and every person has access to permanent, affordable housing and the resources to sustain it.

MOVING FORWARD

Making these initiatives a reality will require a new coalition of public, private, and nonprofit organizations to coordinate action. United Way will continue to convene key stakeholders through a Technical Committee charged with monitoring progress across initiatives, and via various implementation teams charged with overseeing program design for each pilot initiative.

The expertise, enthusiasm, and unwavering dedication of the Technical Committee and other stakeholders will move us forward in making meaningful, enduring change. Homelessness and housing instability are a community issue, and it will take members from all sectors of the community to find solutions.

United Way will work with community stakeholders to ensure the work is adequately resourced through public-private partnerships. Flexible funding for these initiatives is essential to support innovation and allow service providers to move quickly. The City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County will continue to play a critical role in supporting the initiatives. Shared community-wide metrics will be key to maintaining coordination. Realistic and attainable targets will be determined as funding is identified and initiatives are launched.

Several initiatives are entirely new concepts requiring full program design. Initiatives will be piloted and evaluated so that lessons learned can be incorporated into final program design. It is critical all initiatives are responsive to the realities of funding, human resources, and system/organizational capacity. Our community must remain agile in what solutions and innovations we choose to deploy. As long as we stay carefully coordinated in approach and united in mission, we have no doubt this effort will be successful.

When positive outcomes are evident, initiatives will be scaled to the broader community. Even as initiatives are scaled, continuous quality improvement will be applied to implementation and design.

Each of the nine initiatives are at different points in this process and will move forward independently over the next four years. For example, the systems navigation role is entirely new and will require program design. In contrast, there are many successful critical home repair programs that need to be evaluated to make program design adjustments before they can be scaled.