Center For Capacity Building

The Center for Capacity Building supports the Alliance’s mission to end the problem of homelessness by building the capacity of communities to develop effective and lasting local solutions. Hundreds of communities across the country have embarked on planning efforts to end homelessness. Our capacity building efforts involve a broad range of planning approaches and implementation strategies that provide communities with the tools and resources necessary to end and prevent homelessness.

The Center provides training, technical assistance, and strategic planning to help build community assets by enhancing and expanding their core strengths in leadership, planning, program development, and performance measurement. This process helps communities increase their effectiveness and make system-wide changes that will help them achieve the goal of ending homelessness. The Center’s key activities include:

• Data and Research. Critical to the success of a community planning process is the ability to gather data and research on homelessness, including national and local research, homeless counts, service and housing capacity, and available funding resources. Center staff assist communities with all aspects of culling data and research.

• Planning Summits. Plans to end homelessness are a community-wide process and initiating planning can be a positive public event. The Center provides guidance for communities interested in announcing their plans through a planning summit. Summits provide maximum visibility, encourage the participation of stakeholders, and enlist the support of community leaders.

• Plan Development. The Center works with communities to develop a key set of focused strategies, identify critical stakeholders, and facilitate a community-wide planning process to end homelessness.

• Implementation Management. An effective plan is a well managed plan. The Center helps communities to identify accountability for plan implementation, including developing performance measures and building mechanisms into the plan to track progress.

• Housing First Training. Re-housing people who experience homelessness as quickly as possible is important to ending homelessness. The Alliance created a Sourcebook on Housing First for Families to use for Housing First trainings. This sourcebook provides information necessary for communities to develop a Housing First plan. Center staff are available to conduct Housing First trainings.


For more information on the Center for Capacity Building contact Neil Donovan.