By Brian Davis | Director of Development
The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) has reached significant milestones over the last six months in our effort to Bring America Home. NCH has rolled out the Lived Experience Training Academy with a goal of training 300 individuals by the end of 2023. We intend to equip people with the lived experience of homelessness to have a significant, genuine, and measurable impact on their communities, organizations, and, most importantly, their lives. LETA was created by people with lived experience and included focus groups from others throughout the United States. The LETA team will remain in contact with these leaders with a goal of putting them in positions within the local community to put forward ideas to end homelessness.
NCH is deeply troubled by the recent increase in the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness using jail and law enforcement on those who are forced to sleep outside. Multiple cities have introduced harmful measures that codify criminalization practices, including encampment raids. These policies only extend a person’s homelessness for years in some cases. As we commented in the Washington Post on June 26 https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/06/26/mcpherson-homeless-where-are-they-now/ this forced displacement without offering housing is horribly destructive. The most important thing to remember is that these practices which include raiding an encampment and dispersing the residents to unknown destinations, do Not Solve Homelessness, nor will forced institutionalization. NCH began a tour of various cities engaged in harmful and destructive criminalization efforts to call attention to the issue. Beginning in the first quarter of 2023, NCH constructed a “Power Tour” to listen to and ultimately organize advocates in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Seattle, Miami and finally Atlanta.
NCH will support and amplify the actions and activities of local homeless organizers working to decriminalize homelessness while working to end homelessness. NCH heard from people living outside and will use that information to craft national legislation to end the practice of using federal dollars to make it difficult to get back into housing. We will continue to visit other cities in the next few months. The tour aims to shift the national narrative on homelessness in America to embrace a "human right to housing" approach, encourage compassionate, solution-oriented discussions, and discourage apathy and tolerance for criminalization.
The Bring America Home campaign continues with new chairs announced to put forward legislation in all the areas of critical need. We have worked on over the last six months getting thousands of people to sign a petition to support an expansion of Public Housing and Congressional support for ending homelessness. We updated the NCH website to focus more on personal stories and solution documents. In December 2022, the team held a briefing for Congressional staff on some of our priorities. We have gathered many more partners with a new focus on students going forward.
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