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@Home Together is a community-wide effort aimed at ending homelessness for families with children by 2020. In the past 12 months, Montgomery County has served more than 600 families in the homeless system. This includes more than 1,800 children.
This count of families and children includes all families who went through an intake process with the County and received services, including diversion, emergency shelter, and transitional housing.
Without safe, affordable housing, individuals cannot achieve self-sufficiency or higher level goals. Housing stability is especially crucial for the physical, social, and emotional well-being of the children in families who become homeless.
To create brighter futures for the families who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in Montgomery County, the strategies of @Home Together include:
- New and enhanced programs to better engage families early, when they are first at risk of homelessness.
- Better targeted resources to provide rental assistance to families who are at risk of losing their housing.
- For families that enter the emergency shelter, more integration between agencies to reduce the amount of time that families in the shelter placement.
The goal of @Home Together is to ensure that all instances of family homelessness are rare, brief and non-recurring. When a family is at risk of homelessness, the @Home Together effort will work with the family and the network of providers to keep the family from becoming homeless, while providing supportive services to ensure long-term stability. If a families does become homeless, the @Home Together effort will be focused on making this period of homelessness short, with a strong network of integrated services to provide a foundation for the families transition into permanent housing.
The effort is being led by the County's Interagency Commission on Homelessness (ICH).
