After 6 years (term limits!) of service with the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness Leadership Team, the last few as chair, my run ends with 2018. Throughout the month of December I’ve been curating a series of tweets talking about the state of homelessness in Orange County and nationally and the work that we and our partners are doing to make homelessness “rare, brief, and one-time.”
You can take a look at the full twitter archive here to learn about our partners, our successes, our needs, and ways you can help end homelessness in Orange County.
I also tweeted an accompnaying song a day. It is pulled together in a Spotify playlist here, if you want to take a listen. One was this spoken word performance - Mykki Blanco reciting Zoe Leonard’s “I Want a President.”
We’ve had a lot of successes over the last 6 years (and many more before that and to come):
- Hiring our amazing Homeless Services Coordinator Corey Root. She was a Hometown Hero in October!
- Setting the expectation that all Leadership Team members complete racial equity training.
- Bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars for homeless programs into our County - a projected $741,000 in 2019 and $8.5 million since 2005.
- Implementing Homelessness 101 workshops in which over 150 community members have participated (started January 2016). We now have Homelessness 101 and Homelessness 201 coming up in Hillsborough in January and others to follow later in 2019!
- OCPEH Leadership Team members from the elected boards of Carrboro, Chapel Hill, Hillsborough, and Orange County guest lecture about local policies that may impact those experiencing homelessness for CEF students in our UNC School of Social Work economic justice course. The last two years they worked with student teams to complete racial equity assessments related to local policies like affordable housing, environmental justice, displacement, zoning, community engagement, and land use.
- Developing a gaps analysis and systems map to guide our work
- A 50% reduction of people experiencing chronic homelessness since 2010.
Our annual Point-in-Time Count (PIT) is coming up on January 30, 2019. You can help out by signing up to volunteer for the count or to donate materials.
You can find more ways to help end homelessness here and here! Thanks!
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Thank you!
Thank you, Allison, for everything you brought to your participation in and leadership of the Partnership. We are much stronger because of your commitment to the work of ending homelessness. I particularly enjoyed interacting with your students, and I saw up close the way you inspired them. We'll miss you!