A national network of funders supporting strategic, innovative, and effective solutions to homelessness

Janice Elliott

Executive Director, Melville Charitable Trust

Funders Together Board Chair

janice_elliott_sized.jpgJanice has over twenty-five years of innovation and achievement in creating solutions to prevent and end homelessness through advocacy for systems change and the creation of supportive and affordable housing for vulnerable individuals and families.  Before joining the Melville Charitable Trust in September 2012, she led InSite Housing Solutions, a professional consulting firm specializing in the planning and creation of affordable housing that integrates human services. In this capacity, she served as a consultant to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and was the principal author of Opening Doors – Connecticut, a strategic framework for preventing and ending homelessness and the nation’s first state plan to be modeled on the federal Opening Doors initiative.

In her prior role as Managing Director for the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), Janice led several national programmatic and policy initiatives, including Taking Health Care Home, a multi-site initiative that advanced systems reforms to address chronic homelessness. Janice also is a former director of Southern New England programs at CSH, where she led the design of several statewide initiatives that have served as national models for the finance and production of supportive housing. She coordinated an unprecedented collaboration between philanthropy and the State of Connecticut’s housing, behavioral health, human service, and child welfare agencies to fund the creation of over 1,500 new units of supportive and mixed income housing in 40 communities.

 

We joined Funders Together because we believe in the power of philanthropy to play a major role in ending homelessness, and we know we have much to learn from funders across the country.

-Christine Marge, Director of Housing and Financial Stability at United Way of Greater Los Angeles

I am thankful for the local partnerships here in the Pacific Northwest that we’ve been able to create and nurture thanks to the work of Funders Together. Having so many of the right players at the table makes our conversations – and all of our efforts – all the richer and more effective.

-David Wertheimer, Deputy Director at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

-President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address

Funders Together has given me a platform to engage the other funders in my community. Our local funding community has improved greatly to support housing first models and align of resources towards ending homelessness.

-Leslie Strnisha, Vice President at Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland

Our family foundation convenes local funders and key community stakeholders around strategies to end homelessness in Houston. Funders Together members have been invaluable mentors to us in this effort, traveling to our community to share their expertise and examples of best practices from around the nation.

-Nancy Frees Fountain, Managing Director at The Frees Foundation


Sign in with Facebook, Twitter or email.