Alaska: A multi-million dollar grant could help Catholic Social Services of Anchorage and its partners bring the homeless population of that city to “functional zero.”
“This grant will make an enormous impact on our community by expanding the work Catholic Social Services does every day to support families in homelessness to transition to permanent stability,” Lisa Aquino, executive director of CSS, said November 22, 2019. “We believe that this funding will propel us, together with our partners, to achieve functional zero in family homelessness in the Anchorage area.”
The $5 million dollar grant came from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Day 1 Families Fund, which awards one-time grants to organizations that are making an impact on homeless populations. This year, it awarded a total of $98.5 million in grants to 32 organizations working with the homeless population throughout the United States. Anchorage is the most populous city in Alaska, with 294,356 people. Of that population, about 92 families are in the city’s homelessness system at a given time, Aquino told local news station KTUU. “That number has pretty much stayed the same over the past years,” Aquino told KTUU, as some families have been rehoused while others have become homeless.
Currently, there’s room in the Anchorage rehousing system to serve about 60 families per year. Jasmine Boyle, executive director of the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, told KTUU she thinks the grant could help CSS and its local partners to bring the homeless population to essentially zero. “This, I believe, will allow us to either get darn close to or solve family homelessness…In partnership with two other local initiatives that we have in our community,” she said.
