90% of all incarcerated persons will be reentering the community. Without a job, many will become homeless. Having a criminal background is one of the leading causes of poverty and chronic homelessness and the justice system is full of youth, veterans, single adults, and adults with children who do not have the certifications, work skills or experience needed to successfully reenter society. Offender Workforce Development and Vocational Training for Ex-Offenders are both key to the prevention of poverty and homelessness. Offender Workforce Development Specialists work to reduce barriers to reentry, address housing issues, help develop effective vocational training and mentoring programs, and educate employers and the community about the benefits of working the ex-offender population.

Those who are dealing with chronic homelessness often are facing significant challenges. Instances of mental illness, chemical dependency, disability, etc. are contributing to their inability to maintain stable housing over the long-term. We need to fund a Housing First concept. Individuals need to be able to have a safe place to call home while we then implement case management. It needs to look more like a home than an emergency overnight shelter.

Currently the system says you have to deal with your mental illness, chemical dependency, etc. before you can get housing. You have to engage in an ongoing case management program to qualify and show your stability before you get housing. This is backwards.

Give people respectable, stable spaces to live, help them to identify and manage their issues, and support them over the long term. Public housing style spaces with community based supports.

The people that we tend to lump into the category of "chronically homeless" are facing a broad spectrum of unaddressed social and personal dilemmas that must be addressed in addition to their need for shelter, and to measure our society's progress and/or success in meeting their needs strictly by our ability to provide housing is to act with an entirely incomplete definition of the problem.

In most instances, it is unrealistic to expect a person who has experienced many years of trauma, dis-empowerment, frequently substance addictions, and oftentimes severe mental illness, to navigate--or even comply with--programs primarily designed around the outcome of non-homelessness.

Before we leap to attempts at ending chronic homelessness, we need to develop a more sophisticated perspective on the conditions of those who fall within this category. Many remain homeless by choice, and short of mass-imprisonment, we cannot expect to end chronic homelessness before we offer these members of our community a real reason to engage--a sense of hope and purpose, not necessarily to be housed, but on their own terms.

The current trend to move public resources away from shelter services towards HUD's limited definition of prevention and "rapid" re-housing is socially unjust. This poor policy redirects public funds that provide basic needs for the most vulnerable among us to those who are far more capable of reaching self-sufficiency.

While it is crucial that we do resource programs that provide support for those at risk of becoming homeless, or who are experiencing a short-term episode of homelessness, we should not be financing this through the reallocation of resources direly needed to provide for those who are quite a long way from meeting the eligibility requirements to be "rapidly" re-housed. Such programs are designed to favor those who are likely to reach self-sufficiency in fairly short time-frames, which is rarely the case for a person who falls into the chronic category.

Providers of services for those who are chronically homeless are severely under-resourced, and thus are unable to offer hospitable environments truly conducive to improving the quality of life for those they serve.

To address this issue through the lens of "ending chronic homelessness" is to overlook the truth of those experiencing it. While public initiatives continue to move in this direction, those experiencing it continue to find themselves in greater and greater states of desperation.