Coalition For the Homeless

The Coalition for the Homeless is the leader of the homeless response system for Harris, Fort Bend, and Montgomery Counties.Since 2012, the Coalition has been proud to serve as lead agency to The Way Home Continuum of Care (CoC), which is the local homeless response system.

To better understand our role, think of air travel. Airlines that you have likely heard of (United, Delta, Southwest, etc.) work directly with passengers to move them from point A to point B. But just as important are the airport personnel and air traffic control, which ensure that the airlines can serve passengers efficiently and to the highest degree of service. They also perform other necessary behind-the-scenes functions, like monitoring and reporting on big-picture data to understand trends in air travel — and using what they learn to make sure there are enough gates at the airport to manage traffic.

In the same way, our community has dozens of direct service providers who work directly with people experiencing homelessness to move them from homelessness to housing. And the Coalition supports those agencies by making sure we are coordinated and well resourced, and by keeping an eye on system-level data and trends.

For every $1 the Coalition receives in private funding, we bring more than $47 in public funding into the Houston region to implement homelessness solutions. Under the Coalition’s leadership, since 2011 overall homelessness in the Houston region has decreased by more than 60% and, since 2012, the partners of The Way Home have placed more than 28,000 people into permanent housing programs.