Author: Jessie Metcalf

Without a safe place to sleep at night, it’s hard to focus on employment, staying healthy, raising a family — the building blocks of a good life. In communities across the country, organizations, philanthropists, and government are working hard to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring. In many cases, they’re using AWS to coordinate their response.

Community Solutions is a US-based nonprofit working to end homelessness through its Built for Zero program, a movement uniting with cities across the US to bridge strategy and support to reduce homelessness. The AWS Fix This podcast sat down with the Community Solutions team to see how it uses AWS to unlock data to measure and monitor its progress. Plus, representatives from the nonprofit Coming Home of Middlesex County, based in New Jersey, joined to discuss how Middlesex County and Community Solutions are working together to create a future where no one is left behind.

To prevent citizens from falling behind on their mortgages, the federal government awarded states $10 billion from the Homeowner Assistance Fund (HAF), delivered under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. This funding required sign-off from the US Department of the Treasury to access and the funds needed to be distributed quickly. AWS customer ProLink Solutions supported states with rapidly designing and deploying new programs and workflows, which helped states acquire these funds and quickly deliver them to citizens in need.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), the US has a shortage of 6.8 million rental homes for low-income renters. Many communities have implemented rent registration and assistance programs to preserve affordability and prevent displacement. Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and partners are leveraging the cloud to monitor the availability of rental units in real time to support their work.

Even before the pandemic, many people were rent burdened, with a quarter of renters paying more than half their income on rent. US Congress approved two bills containing $45 billion for emergency rental assistance programs (ERAP) that states and local governments can use to support people in need. Distributing these funds quickly and efficiently requires local agencies to rapidly design and deploy new engagement models, programs, and workflows that are easy to use, that can quickly scale up to meet demand, and are flexible enough to adjust to changes in federal and local requirements. Learn how these AWS customers and partners are leveraging the cloud to quickly launch and distribute benefit assistance programs like emergency rental assistance.

Removing the barriers to rehousing, especially for those chronically homeless, is a critical part of a community’s efforts to combat homelessness. This month, the City of Baltimore is launching My Digital Data Locker, an innovative cloud-based platform that gives people who are experiencing homelessness a secure place to manage digital copies of vital documents. This service reduces one of the key barriers to housing for people experiencing homelessness: vital document storage and access. The solution uses the cloud.

Efforts to prevent and combat homelessness are limited by the lack of comprehensive data about people experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for states to identify trends and emerging needs to respond and make data-driven decisions about the effective deployment of resources. The cloud can help bridge information silos. Read on for examples of how states use the cloud to bridge data silos and better serve the homeless.