The Blueprint to End Homelessness, a plan guiding a community-wide initiative, contains many recommendations, but at its core it calls for significant shifts in our approach to homelessness, including:

• Move from emergency responses to lasting solutions.
• Stop “managing” homelessness and begin working together to end it. Rather than helping to make homeless people more comfortable out on the streets or offering short-term emergency services, we have to strive to get them into housing and help them begin rebuilding their lives.
• Significantly increase homelessness prevention efforts. Prevent rather than wait for families and individuals to lose their homes.
• Significantly increase the supply of supportive housing. Affordable housing matched with support services and employment has been proven highly effective in keeping even people with multiple challenges housed and moving toward self-sufficiency.
• Move from funding to investing. We need to get a better “return” on our investments. It is vitally important to begin measuring our success not by how many people have been sheltered or helped but by how many people have moved from homelessness to housed. CHIP is working to help make the system both more effective and accountable. We know what works: as a community we need to ensure that we are following the examples of model programs to get the best results possible.
• Begin working as a team rather than individual players each with their own game plan. Indianapolis needs to do a better job of coordinating local assistance so that we can maximize existing resources and utilize each others' strengths. Assistance programs can no longer afford to work in isolation from each other and in a piecemeal, fragmented approach.

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