Beginning in 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supported a pilot program to prevent homelessness for survivors of domestic violence and their families. Here's what they learned.

Highlights from the 2014 gathering of public sector partners, key stakeholders, grantees, and experts to share and advance the collective effort to end chronic homelessness in Los Angeles.

Reflections on our 2014 Funders Institute

The California Wellness Foundation and The California Homeless Youth Project discuss the need for data and what philanthropy can do about it.

The 100,000 Homes Campaign is using data to end and prevent homelessness - and you can too.

In a climate of growing need and shrinking resources, data is a critical management tool that helps communities better understand where efforts are achieving the desired impact and, in contrast, where changes are needed to improve results. These resources from USICH aim to help communities improve their data quality and use data more effectively to make policy, funding, and program design decisions.

• Performance Measurement of Homeless Systems
• What Gets Measured, Gets Done: Toolkit on Performance Measurement for Ending Homelessness
• Making the Most of HMIS Data: A Guide to Understanding Homelessness and Improving Programs in Your Community
• Building Knowledge, Effectiveness, and Capacity: Advancing Data on Homelessness in Eleven Communities
• The Community Perspective: Using Research and Technology to Identify Solutions to Prevent and End Homelessness
• Demonstrating the Uses of Homeless Data at the Local Level
• From Intake to Analysis: Developing a Continuum of Care Data Quality Plan
• Enhancing HMIS Data Quality
• HMIS Self-Assessment Tool
• HMIS Budget and Staffing Toolkit

Access these and other resources on the USICH website. 

After Labor Day, many communities will start to plan for their January Point-in-Time Homeless Counts. How can you help as a funder?  

Every summer the National Alliance to End Homelessness conference on ending homelessness has been a highlight for me. It reinvigorates me. It teaches me. It reminds me why we do this work – day in and day out.

Data on youth homelessness is notoriously lacking.  We need better data to understand the scale of the problem and our progress toward solving it.

With a scarf and a clipboard, I joined many government officials to conduct a census of people who were spending the night on the street in D.C. with low temperatures in the 30s.