Over the past seven months, emergency shelters in the Greater Hartford area
have been working together to improve our system of providing services, and
ensure that all shelters are focused on quickly helping people return to
housing. The area shelters have all spent months working together to make sure
all aspects of the shelter program were focused on housing.
As part of this learning process, the Greater Hartford shelters launched a 100 Day
Campaign starting in August to house 265 households out of the shelters over
just 100 days. So far, this campaign has led to shelters getting creative and
forming partnerships with local businesses to fundraise, as well as collaborating
even more closely with local housing programs. Shelters are tracking their
progress, and at the end of the fifth week, 54 households had already left the
shelters and entered housing! The shelters who are participating in this
campaign include CRT’s McKinney Shelter, CRT’s East Hartford Family Shelter,
The Open Hearth, ImmaCare, South Park Inn, Salvation Army Marshall House,
and the YWCA.
In addition to this, the whole state of Connecticut has embarked on a challenge to
End Family Homelessness, and across the state all of our family shelters and
housing programs are coming together to help families get back into housing
quickly.
The Hartford 100 Day campaign began on August 15th and will run until
November 23rd, and in that time, if we reach our goal, it will mean we have
housed people three times as quickly as over the past year, and that matters!
• If you know of any landlords with openings, we’d love to share the
information with our shelters – you can contact our Housing Facilitator
here, or invite the landlords to call our office!
• Making a House a Home is continuing to furnish apartments for families
and individuals housed through the campaign, and we always need
volunteers
We are so excited to see all the housing happening out of the shelters, and can’t wait to see where the rest of the campaign takes us!