The Journey Home, Baltimore’s plan to end homelessness, awarded funding to expand efforts to assist City’s homeless population

BALTIMORE, Md. (June 19, 2015)—Today, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced the National Center on Employment and Homelessness selected Baltimore to participate in their flagship effort, The Connections Project—a three year, place-based, systems-level collaboration and capacity-building project focused on increasing employment and economic opportunity for homeless jobseekers.

Baltimore’s Connections Project—Journey to Jobs—will expand existing partnerships created through The Journey Home by building a system-level collaborative effort focused on increasing access to employment and economic opportunity for people experiencing homelessness.

“We recognize that people experiencing homelessness can face many difficulties on the road to employment,” said Mayor Rawlings-Blake. “Journey to Jobs will transform lives for homeless jobseekers by helping to clear criminal backgrounds and creating more flexible child support polices. “

Journey to Jobs will facilitate policy changes and support promising practices that reduce barriers to employment and housing so that people experiencing homelessness can achieve stability. This national project will plan, implement, and strengthen innovative systems collaboration ideas in order to meet the goal of increasing employment and economic opportunity for homeless jobseekers.

Through this national initiative, Baltimore will receive over $100,000 alongside, intensive technical assistance, and peer learning over the next three years.

“Over the next three years, we’ll work alongside key stakeholders across the City and State to tear down barriers to employment and housing for people experiencing homelessness” said Adrienne Breidenstine, Executive Director of the Journey Home.

The Journey Home brings public, private, and non-profit stakeholders together to work collectively to make homelessness rare and brief by:

Increasing the supply of affordable housing
Increasing access to comprehensive and affordable health care
Ensuring that people have sufficient incomes and employment opportunities
Building the capacity of emergency and preventive services
Baltimore is one of five cities selected to participate in the project. The other four awardees are: Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Houston.

The National Center on Employment and Homelessness and the Connections Project is made possible through the generous support of the Oak Foundation and the Melville Charitable Trust.