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March 25, 2022

The Partnership is evolving our name To End Homelessness

Our evolution to The Partnership To End Homelessness reflects a new organizational strategy to deepen our partnerships and expand our prevention work. This strategy is anchored by our belief, and four decades of experience, that homelessness can be ended by preventing it. We seek to inspire a citywide approach to homelessness that is designed to prevent rather than triage the problem because homelessness is disproportionately hurting, and leaving behind, women and children of color. The time is now to correct this inequity and set and achieve the goal of making NYC a place that guarantees safe, affordable housing for all its residents.

We have retained Partnership as the anchor of our new name. For us, partnership is the way we work with our clients and their families. It also expresses that our impact is the achievement of our partners, like you. And, our approach of partnering with government agencies, tenants, property owners, non-profits, corporations and foundations underscores that no one group or sector can alone solve homelessness. Partnership is who we are and how we work.

To End Homelessness has replaced “for the homeless” in our name to highlight that homelessness is not a given or inevitable. Our work has shown us that all experiences of homelessness begin with a person losing their home. Domestic violence, overcrowding and evictions are the main drivers of homelessness in our city. A focus on prevention can disrupt this loss of a home and solve homelessness before it even happens. And, it is the most cost-effective answer. While the current average rent arrears of a family in need of assistance is $4,000, the cost to provide shelter for that family if they lose their home is almost $70,000 annually.

Our new name also seeks to humanize and unveil who experiences homelessness, highlighting that homelessness is an economic experience, not an identity marker. The nearly 15,000 children sleeping in City shelters tonight make up more than one-third of the entire homeless shelter population of NYC. Upwards of 90 percent of family shelter households are women-headed, and more than 95 percent of all shelter residents are people of color. Through this lens, ending homelessness and the guarantee of safe, affordable housing for all New Yorkers can be better understood as a racial and gender equity and justice imperative – all the more so when society is currently spending more money to allow people to lose rather than keep their homes.

As The Partnership To End Homelessness, our strategy is set to expand and focus solely on our homelessness prevention programming. Our job is to provide each New Yorker who turns to us for assistance with the basic foundation upon which they can securely rebuild their homes and lives. In our core housing and crisis program, we provide rental and financial assistance in tandem with property owner mediations so that our clients do not lose their homes, and their children can stay in school. This means providing payments directly to property owners to cover the cost of our clients’ unpaid back rent so that they can keep their homes, (or relocate to a safe home when necessary in certain domestic violence situations), rather than ending up in a shelter. Our rental assistance program provides full payments, is open to undocumented New Yorkers and does not require repayments or future ability to pay. Our crisis intervention work supports clients to access benefits to which they are entitled, such as housing vouchers and right to counsel, so that their families are kept out of shelter. Our health and well-being programming augments our housing and crisis work by providing individual, culturally-appropriate counseling, peer and health support groups, and financial education and empowerment training to further stabilize our clients, many of whom are grappling with complex trauma as result of domestic violence and abuse.

Last year, our prevention work stopped homelessness in its tracks for ten thousand New Yorkers who turned to us for assistance. Our focus now is to expand our rental and financial assistance programming to reach even more New Yorkers who are on the brink of homelessness, and prevent it from becoming their experience. And, with a story-based approach, we will change the narrative on homelessness and showcase prevention as the model for ending homelessness that could be implemented far beyond The Partnership.

In our name evolution, we retained our house and heart logo because it captures that safeguarding housing, and ending homelessness is made possible by the heart of our partners. Partners like you, who make it possible for us to do what we do, when we answer the call from a mom who has escaped years of domestic violence, or whose job has been made part-time rendering her in need of temporary assistance while she seeks a second job. In partnership with you, we save their homes.

We look forward to our ongoing work on your behalf to ensure all New Yorkers have a safe home, in which they can watch their children lay down to sleep, safely, each night. With you, we can create a city in which our children’s only experience with homelessness is reading about it in history books.

Thank you for your partnership.

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