On Jan. 3, the Palm Beach County Continuum of Care (CoC); Palm Beach County Community Services Department Division of Human and Veteran Service (DHVS); the West Palm Beach Veteran Affairs Medical Center; Stand Down/Faith, Hope, Love, Charity, Inc.; The Lord's Place; Adopt-A-Family of the Palm Beaches, Inc.; Gulfstream Goodwill Industries; the Salvation Army; and the Senator Philip D. Lewis Center partnered to launch the From Serving to Served initiative.

This initiative focuses on providing needed services to veterans experiencing homelessness in Palm Beach County. Since its launch, community partners have served over 110 veterans with support services such as bus passes, access to mobile showers, health care services, and providing meals.  Twenty of these veterans have been placed in permanent housing through various programs, such as HUD-VASH.

"The From Serving to Served initiative reflects a shared belief and commitment of effectively serving veterans and their families with the ultimate goal of ending veteran homelessness," said DHVS Director Wendy Tippett. "Although our close collaboration has helped provide a wide variety of services to veterans in this short time, we acknowledge that our work is not over. We continue to work towards our common goal of ensuring that homelessness in Palm Beach County is rare, brief, and nonrecurring."

Through the process of serving these veterans, outreach efforts from community partners have identified additional veterans in need of support services. To better serve our veterans, the CoC is looking to members of the community who are able to provide employment or lease affordable housing through the SMART Landlord campaign.

"Our homeless program teams have made considerable progress to provide veterans with numerous services to include the provision of showers, food, laundry and health care services in our Veterans Resource Center and temporary, rapid and permanent housing with the help of our community partners," said West Palm Beach VA Medical Center Director Donna Katen-Bahensky. "Many veterans face unimaginable obstacles after leaving the service which are then compounded if they also experience homelessness. Through the continuation of our demonstrated commitment to our nation's heroes, we are confident that we will reach our goal which is to ensure that every veteran has a place to call home."

For more information about the SMART Landlord campaign and to sign up go to https://bit.ly/2X4bx4f or call (561) 355-4742.  

To learn more about the CoC's plan to end veteran homelessness and how to you can help, call (561) 355-4775 or visit www.homelessplan.org.