How Minneapolis Managed a Massive Homeless Encampment

By partnering with cities across America, the 100,000 Homes campaign is going directly to the streets to end homelessness - and it’s working. With roughly 700,000 people in the United States experiencing homelessness, this organization seeks to address that using a tiered system that considers individual health needs as well.

New Orleans implemented an extraordinary 10-year plan that engaged unprecedented cross-sector collaboration between government, non-profit, and private entities to provide housing and housing services to the city's homeless veterans. The city's success in providing homes for every single veteran formerly on their streets motivated cities across the nation to tackle the crises using similar means, leading to a 1/3 decline veteran homelessness since 2010.

Assertive community treatment teams working through outreach-centered programs in Maricopa County have become an industry standard for treating those with persistent and severe mental illnesses who have recently been incarcerated. They provide a long-term approach, aiming to halt a cycle of incarceration and hospitalization by focusing on underlying issues such as what caused the police interaction and incarceration.

In Houston, TX, many individuals with mental illnesses cycled in and out of emergency care while arrested or incarcerated. Houston’s police department has decreased the number of incarcerated who have mental illness by opening a division to mental health called the Chronic Consumer Stabilization Unit. Now Milwaukee seeks to replicate Houston’s results.

Alleys in Seattle were once places of illicit, illegal, and unsanitary activity. The International Sustainability Institute in Seattle began organizing music and art events to bring in people, which, in turn, cleaned-up the crime and garbage. As an urban development strategy, adjacent vacant storefronts re-opened for business and beautification could be seen in new gardens.

African American boys were being treated less-than-equally by the Oakland Unified School District – a change of culture was implemented and the playing field leveled. Now, Minnesota is looking to adopt the same system that was started in Oakland by creating schools that are exclusively for African American males in hopes to help them reach higher standards of achievement.

The Homeless World Cup is the premier soccer tournament for homeless players. Programs around the world use soccer as a means of building a sense of community, sublimating negative energies, and encouraging personal growth.

To combat rampant homelessness, cities like New York are investing in supportive housing and comprehensive, consistent services for the homeless population. Although San Francisco has smaller-scale supportive housing programs. political will and regular funding are necessary to grow those initiatives and make a large impact on homelessness in the city.

San Francisco's Care Not Cash program began in 2004 in response to the city's homelessness crisis. One facet of the program is an outreach team, whose members regularly visit homeless people on the street to connect them to resources such as housing and drug rehabilitation.

Boston professors visit countries and homes of foreign students to better understand their culture and gain insights about how to better teach them. The goal is to reach across cultural divides to help a big part of the student population — emigres from faraway lands — that is plagued with low standardized test scores and high dropout rates. Accompanying photojournalism: http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2015/09/12/seeking-cultural-connections/L3mIQAQM3v9YT9A2K4JliL/story.html