Preventing Homelessness and Emergency Assistance

Over the past few months, Triangle United Way and some of its member agencies have started to question what is important about emergency assistance and how can it best end homelessness. Is the $150 or $200 that is made available once each year to help someone pay their rent or utilites the best use of emergency assistance? At this point, we are able to say that it does preserve housing for a period of a month, but what happens after that? If someone comes back one year later for the same emergency assistance? Have we helped them or enabled them?

Many of our organizations are working in many different ways to provide emergency assistance. Triangle Family Services has taken a leap of faith and is doing something a bit different in that they provide up to $1,500 in stabilization funds along with 4-6 months of intensive case management for families either at-risk or already homeless. Of course, the challenge is that they are working with far fewer clients so the actual number of recipients is relatively small. However, these families are receiving more services than merely walking in off the street for a check for emergency assistance.

The data on whether or not such preventive services are effective is inconclusive at best. Some reports have argued that support services do not matter in ending homelessness. Some additional work has been compiled by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development that talks about best practices associated with preventing homelessness. My hope is that over time we can look at the different models of emergency assistance we provide to different member agencies and see what the impact really is here locally.