Press Release - HOUSING COMMITTEE CHAIRS, CONNECTICUT COALITION TO END HOMELESSNESS HOLD PRESS CONFERENCE FOR DEDICATED FUNDING TO 'RESCUE THE HOMELESS RESPONSE SYSTEM'
Ryan Beach
For
Immediate Release
February 9, 2023
For More Information Contact:
Ryan Beach
HOUSING COMMITTEE CHAIRS, CONNECTICUT COALITION TO END HOMELESSNESS HOLD
PRESS CONFERENCE FOR DEDICATED FUNDING TO 'RESCUE THE HOMELESS RESPONSE SYSTEM'
Hartford, CT – Today the chairs of the Housing Committee and leadership from the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness and Connecticut’s Homeless Response Agencies held a press conference to tout support for dedicated funding for the Homeless Response System.
Participants called for $50,000,000 to be appropriated to the Department of Housing and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services to be dedicated to Connecticut’s Homeless Response System. Specifically, the funding will ensure that:
- Homeless serving agencies and frontline staff are properly resourced and compensated, including youth-serving agencies, municipal housing, and housing supports.
- Funding is annualized for the Coordinated Access Networks.
- Funding is annualized for cold-weather emergency response.
- A pool of flexible funding is subsidized to serve people experiencing homelessness.
This ask represents the 2023 CT CAN End Homelessness Legislative Agenda and is currently contained in HB 6554.
CCEH Chief Executive Officer Evonne Klein spoke to the importance of securing this funding: “This is the first step in strengthening the foundation of our system that is a vital part of Connecticut’s emergency and crisis response. Passage of HB 6554 will set us on a path to end homelessness in Connecticut over the next 4 to 5 years. We need the legislature to help so we can help the people who are facing losing their home.”
Speakers made an impassioned plea to rescue Connecticut’s Homeless Response System as the state saw the first marked increase in homelessness for the first time in over a decade. This lifesaving and stability restoring system is overburdened, with an 82% increase in households who received appointments for a housing crisis since 2019. Service providers, including outreach workers, case managers, and other frontline staff served nearly 8,000 people in 2022. Without these dollars, this chronically underfunded system, and the critical services it delivers will face unprecedented challenges in the coming year in efforts to prevent and end homelessness.
Yezenia Lebron, who oversees Integrated Care and Mental Health programs at New Reach, relayed her personal experience of how crucial it is to retain staff and the considerable challenge in serving a person when the person they build trust with changes every few months: “This whole housing crisis system needs to be on a strong foundation, not clay.”
Teth Pickens, Co-Chair of the CT CAN End Homelessness Policy and Advocacy Committee highlighted the challenges of keeping staff from falling into homelessness themselves in a sector that cannot afford to pay competitive wages to other non-profit agencies: “It is a sad day in America when a person goes from a distributor of resources to a recipient of those resources.”
CCEH Chief Operations Officer Sarah Fox spoke to the importance of the system and the workers who make it function: “We have a system, an emergency crisis response system that we built across the state, that rises to the challenge and makes sure people are safe, that answers complex problems together. Twelve years ago, we didn’t have this level of coordination... When people have a crisis, you need a system to respond. That is what the Homeless Response System does every single day.”
About CCEH:
CCEH represents more than 75 members – emergency shelter providers, transitional housing providers, community and business leaders, and strategic partners – who share the goal of ending homelessness. In partnership with communities throughout the state, CCEH advances this goal through leadership, community organizing, advocacy, research, and education. Our collective mission is to prevent and end homelessness.
Ryan Beach (he/him/his)
Interim Director of Development and Communications
Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH)
257 Lawrence St.
Hartford, CT 06106