What Is the Federal Strategic Plan?

The plan was developed by USICH in partnership with the 19 federal agencies that make up the USICH Council, and it will be updated annually to reflect the latest evidence, progress, and input. To develop All In, USICH undertook a comprehensive and inclusive input process that included more than 1,500 online comments and 81 listening sessions that gathered feedback from thousands of providers, elected officials, advocates, and others—including more than 500 who have experienced homelessness. The process included people from nearly 650 communities, tribes, and territories.

All In sets an ambitious goal to reduce homelessness 25% by 2025 and encourages state and local governments to use the plan as a blueprint for developing their own strategic plans and for setting their own ambitious goals for 2025. The plan is built around six pillars: three foundations—equity, data and evidence, and collaboration—and three solutions—housing and support, crisis response, and prevention. To drive and measure national, local, and systems-level progress, USICH will develop and publish implementation plans and guidance for partners and communities. View the Implementation Plans & Guidance page.

Every American deserves a safe and reliable place to call home. It’s a matter of security, stability, and well-being. It is also a matter of basic dignity and who we are as a nation.

Plan Overview

Excerpts:

• Letter From POTUS
• Message From USICH Chairs
• Message From Director
• Acknowledgements
• Executive Summary
• State of Homelessness
• Vision for the Future
• Lead With Equity
• Use Data & Evidence
• Collaborate at All Levels
• Scale Housing & Supports
• Improve Response Systems
• Prevent Homelessness
• Framework for Implementation
• Federal Funding & Programs

The United States of America can end homelessness by fixing public services and systems—not by blaming the individuals and families who have been left behind by failed policies and economic exclusion.

Solutions

Solution: Lead With Equity

Strategy 1: Ensure federal efforts to prevent and end homelessness promote equity and equitable outcomes

• Identify expected equity outcomes with qualitative and quantitative measures and plans for how programs and agencies responsible for carrying out strategies and actions included in this plan will collect and report on the information used to measure these outcomes.
• Establish tools and processes for identifying, analyzing and updating agency-specific policies, practices, and procedures for programs and agencies responsible for carrying out strategies and actions included in this plan that may inhibit opportunity to advance and promote equity.
• Create a mechanism to publicly report federal actions taken by USICH and its member agencies to advance equity and support local and state efforts to address disparities.
• Provide messaging and guidance to state and local stakeholders about promising practices that are having a measurable impact on disparities.
• Ensure all guidance, tools, and websites are designed to be accessible and to ensure effective communication for people with disabilities; and take steps to ensure meaningful access for people with limited English proficiency.
• Create learning opportunities across USICH and its member agencies on racial equity, cultural competence, cultural humility, and disability competence.
• Hire people and partner organizations with a strong equity analysis to inform actions taken under this strategy.

Strategy 2: Promote inclusive decision-making and authentic collaboration

• Identify existing federal advisory groups, committees, and workgroups that are focused on preventing and ending homelessness and seek ways to expand membership to include people with lived experience and for ensuring meaningful participation and compensation for their time and expertise.
• Review federal processes and administrative requirements for contractors that deliver relevant technical assistance (TA) and capacity-building related to implementation of the strategies within this plan to allow for an expanded pool of selected contractors and firms with higher diversity of staff and management and/or people with lived experience.
• Identify ways to conduct accessible outreach to and hire people with lived experience in federal job announcements for programs and agencies responsible for carrying out strategies and actions included in this plan.
• Allow for and incentivize inclusive processes that allow for meaningful engagement in all federal funding grants that directly impact people at risk of or experiencing homelessness.
• Create flexibilities in existing federal programs to encourage funding recipients that serve people at risk of or experiencing homelessness to hire people with lived experience and compensate them on par with other staff.
• Create flexibilities in existing federal programs to allow recipients to use program funds to compensate people with lived experience participating on local advisory councils.
• Examine barriers such as federal program caps on earned income and explore opportunities to provide flexibilities for people with lived experience to be compensated for their participation in planning activities and input processes without risking any benefits or assistance that they receive from the federal government.
• Incentivize, strengthen, and expand opportunities for professional development and mentoring focused on supporting people with lived experience as they take on new types of roles, especially leadership roles.
• Create learning opportunities across USICH and its member agencies on creating environments that will allow people with lived experience to thrive and not be retraumatized.

Strategy 3: Increase access to federal housing and homelessness funding for American Indian and Alaska Native communities living on and off tribal lands

• In accordance with Executive Order 13175 and the Presidential Memorandum on Tribal Consultation and Strengthening Nation-to-Nation Relationships, build upon the tribal consultation that took place to inform the development of this plan and further consult tribes on strategies and solutions that will impact housing instability and homelessness for American Indian and Alaska Native communities living on and off tribal lands.
• Explore opportunities to expand Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act programs (the primary vehicle for developing housing in tribal land).
• Promote and expand opportunities to hire more AI/AN people across agencies responsible for carrying out strategies and actions included in this plan.
• Coordinate a federal TA strategy to support efforts of tribes and Native-serving organizations operating off tribal land to address homelessness and increase access to funding streams that are newly available to tribes.

Strategy 4: Examine federal policies and practices that may have created and perpetuated racial and other disparities among people at risk of or experiencing homelessness

• Partner with the agencies responsible for carrying out the strategies and actions within this plan and review policies and regulations associated with the federal programs and initiatives to assess whether and how current policies and programs may perpetuate racial disparities or create barriers for marginalized groups and people of color and identify achievable policy and program changes to advance equity.
• Develop tools and provide direct TA to help grantees, states, local governments, and U.S. territories to implement equitable policies and practices and build the capacity of organizations to serve people of color and marginalized groups who face current and historic discrimination based on race, disability, class, and gender identity.
• Highlight communities that achieve reductions in racial and other disparities, and create tools, products, and guidance based on their strategies.

Solution: Use Data & Evidence to Make Decisions

Strategy 1: Strengthen the federal government’s capacity to use data and evidence to inform federal policy and funding

• Catalyze existing federal infrastructure to leverage underused qualitative and quantitative data sources that could be utilized to better understand people experiencing homelessness or who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness to inform federal policy and funding decisions.
• Collaborate to strengthen existing and identify new ways to formally share and use data across all partner agencies, particularly HUD, DOJ, SSA, DOL, Education, HHS, USDA, and VA.*
• Gather input from a broad range of experts to ensure that federal data-sharing and data-use strategies do not perpetuate inequities, increase administrative burdens, compromise personal information, or reduce trust.
• Provide guidance and messaging about how national data can be used to inform state and local processes and decision-making.
• Create a federal dashboard to track and report relevant data from across various federal data sources with the goal of making data available sooner and increasing capacity for utilizing data to inform actions taken in relation to this plan.
• Promote federal actions to create publicly available data disaggregated by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, income, veteran status, age, or other key demographic variables while being intentional about when it is collected and shared while protecting privacy.

Strategy 2: Strengthen the capacity of state and local governments, territories, tribes, Native-serving organizations operating off tribal land, and nonprofits to collect, report, and use data

• Increase state and local use of Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) and identify ways to expand coverage, especially of street outreach efforts, to better track unsheltered homelessness and by expanding coverage by non-traditional partners through incentives and/or training and technical assistance.
• Expand community capacity to integrate HMIS data with other federal data sources (i.e., VA HOMES data) as well as state and local administrative data (i.e., Medicaid, corrections, child welfare) to inform planning and decision-making. Support this by developing standards to permit data interoperability between data systems while protecting the confidentiality of all individuals.
• Increase state and local capacity to ensure accurate counts of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, especially unaccompanied minors, youth and young adults, and families, by leveraging existing federal resources, such as AmeriCorps volunteers and members.
• Increase state and local capacity to collect additional data related to housing and homelessness status.
• Ensure that increased use of HMIS and integration of HMIS data with other data sources does not result in the exclusion of victim service providers from strategic decisions about how to use resources equitably, considering that they are prohibited from entering client-level data into HMIS and must use comparable databases instead.*
• Issue guidance on the creation of cooperative agreements and memoranda of understanding and on perceived legal barriers associated with sharing data.
• Coordinate and provide federal guidance, technical assistance, and training for state and local governments, territories, tribes, Native-serving organizations operating off tribal land, homeless service organizations, and local school districts on data collection and utilization methodologies that are culturally appropriate, and trauma informed. Build capacity for robust equity assessment of compounded experiences and overlapping identities.
• Provide guidance and other resources to support the co-creation, implementation, and analysis of qualitative data with communities at the federal and community levels.
• In consultation with Tribal Nations and Native-serving organizations operating off tribal land, identify existing data sources to examine aggregate quantitative and qualitative data on tribal homelessness and housing instability both on and off reservations. Additionally, explore ways to allow for tribal identification within HMIS.
• Engage in efforts to identify more effective ways of collecting data on subpopulations that are historically undercounted, including older adults; people with disabilities; LGBTQI+ people; homeless youth; Latinos; people with HIV; and individuals and families residing in rural areas or tribal lands.

Strategy 3: Create opportunities for innovation and research to build and disseminate evidence for what works

• Develop a federal homelessness research agenda in collaboration with federal agencies, academic researchers, people with lived experience, and innovative programs to conduct, compile, and disseminate research on best practices, the effectiveness of various interventions, and metrics to measure outcomes.
• Identify promising population-specific interventions* and mobilize public-private partnerships to fund effectiveness research.
• Identify mechanisms to provide more flexibility, speed up the approval for, and reduce administrative burdens sometimes associated with waivers.
• Review all COVID-19 flexibilities effectiveness—including the extent to which they increased equity—and determine the feasibility of extending or making them permanent, based on input from recipients of federal funding.
• Engage stakeholders, including people with lived experience, to better understand which federal requirements are most inhibiting to local responses to homelessness and share the findings with federal agency partners to develop strategies to foster innovation.
• Identify and promote lessons learned through successful programs, such as HUD’s Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program, HUD-VA Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) Program VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) Program, and HUD’s Family Unification Program (FUP).
• Expand efforts to evaluate local and state innovative approaches as well as how tribes are addressing tribal-specific needs such as overcrowding.

Solution: Collaborate at All Levels

Strategy 1: Promote collaborative leadership at all levels of government and across sectors

• Engage in a cross-agency media campaign to educate the public on the scope, causes, costs, and solutions to homelessness.
• Engage state and local leaders in a renewed commitment to prevent and end homelessness and provide TA and guidance to state and local governments, territories, tribes, and Native-serving organizations operating off tribal land on how to create local action plans that are aligned with the federal strategic plan but reflective of local conditions and resources.
• Launch targeted and place-based cross-agency technical assistance strategies to drive progress on preventing and ending homelessness in regions with highest rates of homelessness.
• Authentically engage people with lived experience and people from historically marginalized groups in all aspects of planning and implementation. Expand partnerships with philanthropy to fill resource gaps, leverage government resources, and hold government accountable for better performance.
• Identify opportunities to engage businesses, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations on relevant issues related to ending and preventing homelessness.
• Develop and implement strategies to support organizations that receive federal funding to maintain and increase staff capacity, reduce burnout, increase compensation to a living wage, and promote the well-being of staff.

Strategy 2: Improve information-sharing with public and private organizations at the federal, state, and local level

• Coordinate relevant federal TA resources and provide information to CoCs, state and local governments, aging-and disability-network organizations, territories, tribes, school districts, local housing and service providers, and Native-serving organizations operating off tribal land on how to access the support they need.
• Launch a coordinated messaging campaign to challenge public narratives that stigmatize, blame, and dehumanize people experiencing homelessness and to combat local opposition to new affordable housing development and local laws which criminalize homelessness.
• Make information more readily available and accessible on best practices and strategies to finance them at scale as well as tailored guidance and tools for key populations and geographic areas.

Solution: Scale Housing & Supports That Meet Demand

Strategy 1: Maximize the use of existing federal housing assistance

• Conduct a comprehensive review of available policy mechanisms that can increase access to federal housing programs among people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, including eligibility, admissions preferences, referral partnerships, funding incentives, and administrative fees.
• Provide guidance, tools, and technical assistance on a wide range of topics, including strategies for serving people with complex service needs; move-on strategies; accessibility strategies including the use of assistive technologies and home modifications; the use of project-based vouchers; and special housing types, such as single-room occupancy, shared housing, group homes, congregate housing, manufactured home space rentals, and cooperative housing.
• Launch a federal landlord engagement campaign to help support local efforts to increase available rental units where housing assistance can be utilized through landlord education and identifying funding for landlord incentives and risk mitigation.
• Identify and enact the full range of options to reduce documentation as a barrier to housing entry, including regulatory flexibility for federal housing programs; improving access to identification, medical, and benefits documentation needed to determine eligibility; and strengthening collaboration between federal, state, and local agencies. Eliminate federal requirements associated with having a permanent address and/or bank account to access federal assistance.
• Encourage partnerships between providers of housing, aging and disability services, and health care—including treatment for mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders—to colocate, coordinate, or integrate health, mental health, substance use disorder, safety, and wellness services with housing and create better resources for providers to connect program participants to culturally appropriate and gender-affirming housing resources.

Strategy 2: Expand engagement, resources, and incentives for the creation of new safe, affordable, and accessible housing

• Promote continued affordability of units created with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits after expiration of affordability covenants.
• Expand availability and supply of accessible and integrated housing opportunities that meet needs of older adults and people with disabilities.
• Identify and replicate strategies to increase awareness, availability, and use of assistive technology and home modifications that enable people to address accessibility issues and continue to live in their homes.
• Work with state, local, and territorial governments to expand rental assistance and low-cost capital— in part by using State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds—for new construction and rehabilitation of housing for people experiencing or most at risk of homelessness.
• In consultation with tribal leaders and Native-serving organizations operating off tribal land, explore opportunities to strengthen the Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act programs for tribes and tribally designated housing entities.
• In consultation with Native Hawaiian leaders, explore opportunities to strengthen the Native Hawaiian Housing Block Grant Program.
• Encourage use of programs like HOME, HOME-ARP, and National Housing Trust Fund allocations to support housing development for very low-income units that target people experiencing homelessness.
• Encourage states to create preferences in their LIHTC Qualified Allocation Plans (QAPs) to increase investments in housing targeted to people experiencing homelessness and educate local stakeholders on their ability to influence the priorities in their states’ QAP through the provision of incentives.
• Encourage states and cities to review and update their zoning laws and policies to include more land for multiple units (like multifamily housing), offer density bonuses to developers, ease height and density restrictions, create land banks and streamline the permitting and approval process for missing-middle housing types, such as Accessory Dwelling Units.
• Engage Public Housing Agencies as they pursue strategies to revitalize and create public housing units to consider their community obligation to help prevent and address homelessness.
• Explore opportunities to strengthen project-based subsidy programs such as Project Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) and project-based vouchers to increase the creation of deeply affordable housing.
• Improve the Title V Federal Surplus Property Program to increase the number of Title V properties that are converted for use by the homeless services system.
• Engage the financial and business sector, private sector, health care system, philanthropic organizations, and faith-based groups that may be willing to donate resources, land, or property for the purpose of building affordable housing.
• Engage congressional committees on the need to expand federal funding for the development of new affordable housing.

Strategy 3: Increase the supply and impact of permanent supportive housing for individuals and families with complex service needs—including unaccompanied, pregnant, and parenting youth and young adults

• Conduct a gaps analysis of permanent supportive housing needs nationally that includes an examination of racial equity.
• Provide guidance, tools, and technical assistance on effective strategies to braid federal, state and local funds for the purpose of expanding permanent supportive housing.
• Examine opportunities to streamline the process of braiding federal funding sources within permanent supportive housing.
• Highlight and promote examples of how state Medicaid, aging, disability, and health care agencies have coordinated housing assistance with Medicaid-financed health care and supportive services for people with high acuity of health needs and encourage expansion of Medicaid in states that have not yet done so.
• Examine requirements (including eligibility and recordkeeping) associated with federally funded permanent supportive housing to create greater flexibility to serve people with intense service needs, including people experiencing chronic homelessness, and ability to tailor programming to meet needs of specific key populations.
• Promote and amplify lessons learned from the joint HUD/HHS Housing and Services Resource Center.
• Where federal funds are used to create permanent supportive housing, encourage the creation of non-discriminatory preferences for property owners that will agree to operating the property using a Housing First approach and will not further restrict or limit eligibility.

Strategy 4: Improve effectiveness of rapid rehousing for individuals and families—including unaccompanied, pregnant, and parenting youth and young adults

• Provide guidance, tools, and technical assistance to communities to assess outcomes being achieved and tailor their financial subsidy and services practices in order to improve outcomes and to reduce returns to homelessness among individuals and families, including households residing in high-cost, low-vacancy markets.
• Promote and amplify lessons learned from VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families program, HUD-funded programs (including YHDP), and program evaluations and research studies on effective models.
• Promote effective landlord engagement strategies.

Strategy 5: Support enforcement of fair housing and combat other forms of housing discrimination that perpetuate disparities in homelessness

• Encourage states and localities to adopt and strongly enforce source-of-income anti-discrimination laws.
• Foster greater collaboration between homeless programs and fair housing programs at the federal, state, and local levels, including with landlords and property owners.
• Provide data, tools, and guidance in line with the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing mandate so that communities are able to track key outcomes, including how to evaluate where affordable housing is being built and who is accessing available housing.
• Provide outreach and education on HUD’s 2016 Guidance on Application of Fair Housing Act Standards to the Use of Criminal Records by Providers of Housing and Real Estate-Related Transactions.
• Provide updated HUD guidance and technical assistance on the intersection between the Fair Housing Act and Violence Against Women Act.
• Strengthen compliance with and enforcement of housing protections under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and related federal, state, and local laws.
• Provide guidance, training, and technical assistance to state and local governments, and territories on the linkages between housing discrimination and homelessness.
• Examine fair housing regulations and policies to identify potential legal barriers to advancing equity for all groups protected by the Fair Housing Act and include ways to allow communities to adopt and implement a targeted universalism framework while ensuring compliance with fair housing.

Strategy 6: Strengthen system capacity to address the needs of people with chronic health conditions, including mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders

• Invest in accessible programs grounded in evidence and expand the pipeline of providers to address mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders and improve their geographic distribution to target areas with the greatest unmet need.
• Pilot new approaches to train a diverse group of paraprofessionals to increase the number of community health workers, peer support, and other health support workers providing accessible health care and other services, including treatment for mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders , in underserved communities.
• Invest in models that include peer support specialists.
• Integrate treatment for mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders into primary healthcare settings and other non-traditional settings that lower barriers to services.
• Promote harm reduction and low-barrier models to provide primary healthcare services and treatment for mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders.

Strategy 7: Maximize current resources that can provide voluntary and trauma-informed supportive services and income supports to people experiencing or at risk of homelessness

• Examine policy and program rules to identify ways to encourage earned income, increased savings, and wealth-building in order to address the “benefits cliff.”
• Identify ways to align eligibility criteria across programs (i.e., categorical eligibility) so that people do not have to apply and qualify for each program separately (e.g., children in households that receive SNAP are considered categorically eligible for free school meals). Similar categorical eligibility could be applied for other programs.
• Invest in peer-led housing and service delivery models, like recovery coaches for substance use disorders, peer specialists in mental health conditions, and youth mentors/staff with lived experience in youth programs.
• Review federal program requirements and policies associated with programs that serve people at risk of or who are experiencing homelessness to ensure greater compatibility with a Housing First approach with a priority on flexibility, accessibility, and personal choice.
• Provide guidance, training, and technical assistance on accessible and inclusive models and approaches, including but not limited to: person-centered, trauma-informed care, Critical Time Intervention, gender-affirming care, and harm reduction strategies for substance use and health care.
• Identify opportunities to expand upon the federal funding sources that can pay for an array of supportive services as well as training to ensure they are offered with fidelity to best-practice approaches.
• Explore opportunities for philanthropic partners to provide funding for flexible and accessible supportive services.

Strategy 8: Increase the use of practices grounded in evidence in service delivery across all program types

• Promote service delivery models—such as Critical Time Intervention (CTI), Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) Teams, and harm-reduction—that are person-centered, culturally appropriate, disability competent, support individual choice, and encourage voluntary participation.
• Encourage states to consider Medicaid-financed service approaches and models.
• Provide tools, guidance, and technical assistance on cultural responsiveness and humility as well as disability competence in the context of service delivery.
• Given the effectiveness of the SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery (SOAR) model, assess feasibility of replicating this model for other federal programs and agencies to connect to other entitlements and benefits.
• Building on the Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government, identify opportunities to improve the experience of people experiencing, at risk of, or exiting homelessness in their interactions with key federal agencies, including SSA, USDA, DOL, HHS, VA, ED, and Treasury.
• Provide tools to help communities evaluate the consumer experience in their own programs and systems and implement improvements based upon the feedback received.