We wear many hats at the Coalition, and that can be confusing for folks. Rest assured, we’ve done our best to unravel our roles as:

• The State Coalition to End Homelessness.
• The Balance of State Continuum of Care.
• The HMIS Database for the Balance of State Continuum of Care.
• A direct service non-profit providing homeless street outreach, rapid re-housing, and permanent supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness.
• Lots of hats, right? Well, we can boil down what we do across all of those tasks in one simple sentence: we do whatever it takes to make sure that people do not die on the streets.

We provide housing and the supports to keep people in housing. When performing street outreach, we’re not just handing out mittens and hats, but are finding ways to get people into housing quickly. We are housing-focused. We are not managing homelessness, but ending it one person at a time.

Our beliefs, as an organization are:

1. The only solution to homelessness is housing.
2. Homelessness is incredibly costly, and housing is much less so.
3. Anyone can be housed.
4. Limited resources must be focused on those who require them the most.

We care little about accolades, attention, self-serving organizational preservation, or being well-liked. In every thing we do we ask ourselves “so what?” and “how does this affect the people we serve?”. We view service as a privilege, and strive to be the best we can. We try things, fail, refine, try again, and often fail even more. We like to innovate. We’re not fans of either fear or perceived perfection. We’re fans of doing stuff that works. We’re fans of action.

So, we are glad you stopped by to find out a bit more about us and hope we’ve framed that in a real and understandable way. If you find that you agree with the way we’re trying to do things, we’d love to work with you. If you find our tenets a little weird and confusing, we’d still like to work with you. Because only together are we truly going to end homelessness.

Zachary Brown, Executive Director