Ahead of our Housing 2025 goal at the one-year mark!
One year after St. Vincent de Paul set the goal to rehouse 2,025 people experiencing homelessness by the year 2025, the nonprofit celebrates its success already meeting 60% of its goal.
In this past year, the nonprofit has moved 1,289 people into permanent housing, with 99% of those individuals remaining housed as of the goal's year mark. That is 277 individuals ahead of schedule.
SVdP’s Housing 2025 initiative is in response to Arizona’s homelessness crisis. The initiative focuses on three things:
- Moving people into permanent housing
- Increasing SVdP’s permanent rehousing rate by 20%
- Offering the community a shared goal to inspire support systems for neighbors experiencing homelessness
“Our team does all they can every day to respond to this crisis with action and compassion,” said Shannon Clancy, SVdP’s Rob and Melani Walton Endowed CEO. “We’ve come this far, because we’ve worked together as a community. We all need to be relentless in working to help people get back to lives of fulfillment and productivity. Everyone deserves that opportunity.”
Tackling homelessness requires collaboration from various partners at all levels and deploying those resources to fulfill the goal.
“We are proud to work with many community partners that support our initiative,” said SVdP’s Associate Chief Program Officer Julia Matthies, who oversees SVdP’s interim housing communities and shelters and is project manager for the Housing 2025 goal. “We wouldn’t be this far ahead in our goal without their support.”
SVdP rehouses people through its two different shelters and transitional housing programs, as well as its Resource Center and dining rooms. The programs work together and in partnership with agencies across the Valley to find the best permanent housing solution for each individual or family.
“While we are proud to be ahead of our goal, there is still so much work to be done as a community,” Clancy said. “As long as people are living on our streets, our collective work is unfinished. It is a privilege to be able to do this work, to help people return to stability and to make life transformations possible. We are simply the conduit — we can’t achieve these goals without our partnerships and without the generosity of the community.”
Part of the Housing 2025 initiative includes spreading thought leadership and awareness on the topic of homelessness. Most recently, the nonprofit published its article “The truth behind the top 5 homelessness stereotypes,” which aims to address common concerns and misconceptions about homelessness while encouraging more people to join SVdP in its Housing 2025 initiative and homelessness prevention work.
“Helping end homelessness begins by changing our own perceptions and beliefs,” Matthies said. “We can move more people into permanent housing if we start by spreading awareness on the misconceptions that often affect the extent to which people support efforts such as Housing 2025.”
