Faced with an increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness and a system strained doing what it can to address the issue, service providers, shelter and housing providers, community members, faith-based organizations and local funders commissioned the Social IMPACT Research Center to create a Plan to End Homelessness for Porter County.

This groundbreaking plan,  No Place Like Home, lays a foundation to retool and refine the Porter County homeless service delivery system to most effectively prevent homelessness and rapidly re-house people who are experiencing homelessness. The plan’s vision is that all residents will have access to a safe, affordable home in Porter County including resources and support services necessary to prevent and end homelessness.

No Place Like Home includes proven strategies to ending homelessness:

• Increase Access to Stable and Affordable Housing: Incorporate a Housing First approach at every possible opportunity, increase inventory and access to permanent supportive housing and more broadly affordable housing. 
• Focus on Homelessness Prevention: The most cost effective way to address homelessness is to prevent it from ever happening to an individual or family. Expand outreach and service delivery to households at risk of becoming homeless.
• Increase Economic Security: Increase earning potential for households at risk of or currently experiencing homelessness, tearing down the barriers that block households from their greatest earning potential.
• Improve Health and Stability: Coordinate better access to physical and mental health care systems to improve quality of life and increase stability.
• Increase Leadership, Collaboration and Civic Engagement: Full engagement across the spectrum of community stakeholders ensures the effective implementation of this Plan. 
• Retool the Homeless Crisis Response System: Porter County is committed to developing one front door process through which all households can enter. It will also focus its programs on rapid re-housing, and it will promote greater participation in the Homeless Management Information System to better assess the populations at risk and retool programs and processes to best meet the County’s needs.

IMPACT used a dynamic, interactive approach to develop the Plan in order to engage and get feedback from a broad range of perspectives throughout the community, including homeless provider experts, business and political leaders, local foundation leaders and people at-risk of or experiencing homelessness in the county.

Browse our Scribd collection to read the executive summary and full report, and to learn more about what you can do to address homelessness in Porter County.

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