The Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance, or “Alliance,” is a collaborative organization engaging in a communitywide commitment to coordinate, leverage, and align efforts and resources to prevent and end homelessness.
Mission: To develop an evidence-based system of services, including stable housing, designed to meet the unique and complex needs of adults, youth, children, and families in Marion and Polk counties who are at risk of or are experiencing homelessness.
Vision: Our vision is that the Mid-Valley becomes a community of belonging where everyone has access to housing and healthcare, has the opportunity to heal, and is treated with dignity and respect while their safety and basic needs are met.
Purpose: End and Prevent Homelessness
Values: The Alliance furthers it’s mission in light of the following values:
- Collaboration: We engage organizations across many sectors and people with lived experience to find and develop solutions to our community’s most pressing housing/healthcare crises. We intentionally include voices and perspectives from underrepresented communities to ensure more comprehensive and effective solutions.
- Stewardship: We are responsible for ensuring that the resources of The Alliance are used strategically and transparently in our collective pursuit to end and prevent homelessness.
- Inclusion: We seek to create a community that cultivates belonging by designing a Continuum of Care that actively includes people of all walks of life.
- Compassion: We want to relieve human suffering. When one person in our community is at-risk of or experiencing displacement, we are committed to meet them where they are at and offer options.
- Leadership: We take bold steps forward, leading the way to community-defined and evidenced-based solutions to end and prevent homelessness.
- Commitment: We are committed to this work until every person in our community’s basic needs are met.
- Adaptability: We adapt our work to fit the needs in our community, we are nimble, and we are constantly adjusting our approach to match emerging trends.
Goals: Therefore, over the next five years, The Alliance will make measurable progress to:
- Understand our community: Through local quantitative and qualitative data The Alliance
continually seeks to understand the causes of the crises faced by our community
members. - Develop and improve the coordinated system of care and services: The Alliance fosters the development of a continuum of services to (1) strengthen our region’s service providers; (2) expand service provider’s ability to offer everyone a safe place to sleep and a path to stable housing; and (3) build community capacity to prevent homelessness.
- Maximize resources: The Alliance maximizes resources that support the work of the CoC and its service providers through solicitation, leverage, and strategic investments.
- Increase participation in the CoC region: Because homelessness touches every corner of our community, we need vast CoC representation from across our region to solve it.
History
Recognized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in December 2019 as the Marion-Polk region’s Continuum of Care, the Alliance does not provide direct services. Rather, it focuses on communitywide planning and coordination, e.g., aligning services, implementing a strategic plan, collecting and analyzing data, expanding participation in Coordinated Entry, and bringing chronic and Veteran homelessness to functional zero through Built for Zero system improvement strategies. The Alliance is also responsible for annually compiling a single community application for federal Continuum of Care dollars.
The federal Continuum of Care program began in 1994. The local program was coordinated by Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action until 2011, when a group of participating agencies decided to join 26 other counties in the Rural Oregon Continuum of Care.
In 2016, four local governments convened the Mid-Willamette Homeless Initiative, developing a region-wide strategic plan that included exploring the region’s CoC structure. In October 2018, the initiative assessed more than 550 community programs to identify gaps in services.
Leaders, recognizing the critical importance of addressing these local needs, championed reconstituting the two-county Salem/Marion-Polk CoC, OR-504 – this time with greater local government investment and engagement.
ORS 190 Entity
The Alliance is supported by the ORS 190 Entity, Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance, an intergovernmental organization which serves as the Collaborative Applicant for the annual funding application and is responsible for financial, legal, and other administrative functions.
*All photos in the slideshow above are property of Diane Beals. Find her on Instagram: @diane_beals2.