JOIN

JOIN exists to support the efforts of homeless people to transition off the street into permanent housing. Our focus is concentrated on those 1900 men, women, and children who are physically sleeping on the streets of Multnomah County or camping in their cars.
JOIN has three broad program offerings. HomeFirst is a street outreach and housing placement effort that helps 500 men women and children rapidly move off the street into permanent housing. This is undertaken by a 6 person Street Outreach team. This team is physically out on the street and is the only one of its kind serving all of Multnomah County. Through this team, JOIN serves homeless people without regard to ethnicity, race, age, gender, family status, veteran status, diagnosis, or disability. As such, JOIN is often the referral of last resort for people with very complicated stories that have fallen through the cracks in the segmented system structure. Our street outreach efforts lead us to strong collaborations with the Portland Police Bureau and Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, as well as the Park Rangers from Portland Parks. Our housing placement success is built on direct relationships with over 300 private sector rental properties where we can advocate directly with property management to overcome previous evictions and legal histories. Where our advocacy opens the door to housing placement JOIN is able to overcome the barriers that high move in fee costs represent by paying application fees, deposits, and last month’s rent requirements.
JOIN’s second program offering, Home2Stay, grew out of our early experience with housing placement with the recognition that housing placement is just the beginning. We quickly learned that we could not just drop people off in housing and expect them to succeed and so committed to providing 12 months of engaged support through a 5 person housing retention and stabilization team. Through the work of this team, relationships are deepened with each household and cultivated with each property manager so that items and issues that might otherwise lead to eviction can be addressed and mitigated before an eviction is served. We encourage managers to call us about problems that are developing: noise, hoarding, extra people on the lease, neighbor interactions, etc. Our relationship with each tenant and property manager allows us to effectively develop stable tenancies together. One important benchmark of this program is the 75% housing retention success rate at 12 months.
The third aspect of JOIN’s works relates to the provision of basic services at our Day Space through the HomeBase program. HomeBase recognizes that homelessness is not just about where homeless people sleep at night, but where they go during the day. Recognizing that many of the emergency shelter facilities ask guests to leave each morning and do not have open space for people during the day JOIN’s Day Space is one of the few places that homeless people can access important services like showers, mail pick-up, personal item storage, computers, phone, and internet. Not only does it represent a safe place off the streets for 80-100 homeless men, women, and children each week day, the HomeBase program provides an important place from which people experiencing homelessness can organize the resources they do have, address their needs, and pursue their own advocacy around their transition off the street.
Homelessness is a complicated issue with no one single cause and so very difficult for one agency to end on a systemic level. We do however strive to definitively break the cycle of homelessness for the people with whom we work. We understand that homelessness is not only a complex personal tragedy for those who experience but that it also has profound impacts on the broader community. Our vision is that to the extent that homelessness continues to exist we will transform it from a long-term and sometimes chronic condition into a short-term circumstance. By bringing resources to the street where people are sleeping and helping them rapidly transition off the street into housing JOIN’s work not only reduces the harsh impacts of this issue on those who are experiencing homeless and also reduces the burden and expense born by the broader community.