All children deserve a home.
Children need a home to ensure healthy development. The trauma a child experiences while in shelter or on the street can change the rest of their lives. Research paints a bleak picture. When a child experiences too much trauma, their brain rewires until their mental faculties are in a constant state of fight or flight. Children experiencing too much trauma are 5x more likely to experience depression and life expectancy can be reduced by 11 years.
Home works.
Placing a child into a safe and stable home is the antidote to the trauma caused by homelessness. By housing our community’s children, we give them the best shot to live healthy and productive lives. In fact, our community has seen that 80% of families housed through a Housing First program remain stably housed a year after signing their lease.
Tonight, there are 178 families in Ada County waiting for housing – waiting for our help.
That’s why Our Path Home – a partnership of over 40 agencies in Ada County – is dedicated to ending family homelessness by 2025.
How do we end family homelessness? How do we scale our ability to house families? We embrace three proven programs:
• Prevention: keep families in housing
o Services: Rental Assistance, Landlord Mediation, Legal Services
o Outcome: 90% of families remain in their current housing
• Rapid Response: offer short-term assistance for families experiencing homelessness that don’t require long-term services
o Services: Deposit and First Month’s Rental Assistance
o Housing: find existing inventory of housing on a 12-month lease
o Outcome: 70% of families remain stably housed a year later
• Supportive Housing: create housing opportunities for families that require longer-term support
o Services: Intensive Case Management, Rental Assistance, Job Development, Life Skills
o Housing: Dedicated units, where a property manager dedicates a unit to this effort; and use existing housing inventory
o Outcome: 80% of families remain stably housed a year later
We need your help. We know that if we raise these funds, we can scale our impact and ensure that every child is either prevented from experiencing the trauma of homelessness or rapidly placed into a bed of their own.
