Annually, the National Alliance to End Homelessness sponsors a national conference. Called The National Conference on Ending Homelessness, it is designed for service providers, advocates, and people with lived experience of homelessness. This year’s conference took place in Washington, D.C. from July 25-27th.
What people learn
This year’s conference hosted breakout sessions on harm reduction, how to build partnerships with healthcare systems, and shared housing. There were also presentations about preventing homelessness, ending youth homelessness, ending family homelessness, and racial disparities in data. And knowledgeable speakers were present, Ambassador Susan Rice and Jeff Olivet, Executive Director, United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. There are also opportunities to network and learn from other service providers across the country.
Data at The National Conference on Ending Homelessness
Our CEO, Kevin Finn, presented during the breakout session entitled “Data Driven System Transformation.” Kevin talked about how Strategies to End Homelessness worked to build access to Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) data several years ago. Additionally, how our organization works with community partners to build access to other data sets, including eviction prevention data. He also talked about how Strategies to End Homelessness built data analytics capabilities. We did this by hiring a full-time data analyst and building a partnership with 84.51.
Kevin further explained how we were using this data to help prioritize projects for the annual HUD Continuum of Care application. Finally, he shared how our Data Analyst built a system model to show the effects of adding more Permanent Supportive Housing vs. Rapid Rehousing. This system model is informing our local homeless services system about what type of housing works best.
Data continues to inform our work locally. We are committed to using the limited funding from government partners towards the programs with the most successful outcomes.
