Homelessness is a quality-of-life issue for people who lack housing, as well as, for the people who are stably housed.  Experiencing homelessness affects a person or family’s mental and physical health, job status, children’s education, to name a few.  For our community neighbor, homeless encampments can also affect their quality-of-life as well.

What are we doing?
Community Development offers a number of initiatives that span the spectrum of homeless services for our community. 

These initiatives include:

• Funding outreach services - an organization or organizations that come out and meet the homeless where they’re at and connect them to services.
• Connecting to an agency providing prevention services - agency provides financial assistance to help keep a household that is close to losing their home.
• Providing renovation money for our family shelter – a place for families to go while they’re waiting on permanent housing.
• Help an agency buy a new facility a women’s shelter – a place for women to find safety.
• Provide financial assistance to help people get rapidly rehoused - our award-winning project Rosalie Rendu Apartments where we helped an agency purchase multifamily apartments, renovate them and create 12 permanent supportive housing beds.

How Can You Help?

We think that it’s important to help our homeless neighbors get into our system of care.  And the best way to do that is to call numbers where they can be served by the organizations that are helping our homeless.

Numbers to call for neighbors in need of help:

• Single Person/Adult Households: Metro Min Brigaide – 727-756-1952
• Families with Minor Child(ren): Coalition – 727-842-8605 ext. 7
• Veterans: St. Vincent DePaul CARES – 727-203-3896

You can also call our office to learn more about ways you can help.