Pathways Home: Background

What are we doing: The City of La Crosse and La Crosse County have developed a new coordinated homelessness action plan called Pathways Home. The goal is to achieve Functional Zero homelessness in La Crosse by 2029.

Why are we doing this: The city and county have identified a need for a sustainable, data-driven and coordinated response to homelessness. At present, homelessness response is often fragmented and lacks clear goals. This plan will pool resources, learn from what has worked elsewhere, and have accountable leadership.

What’s next: Pathways Home was presented to a joint meeting of La Crosse County Board and City of La Crosse Common Council on Monday, Jan. 8, and implementation of the plan has begun. 

What does functional zero mean: Functional Zero is a benchmark used by many other communities to effectively end homelessness by preventing homelessness whenever possible, and ensuring it’s rare brief and only happens one time if it does occur. For our community, it would mean the number of people experiencing homelessness never exceeds our capacity to move people into permanent housing.

What about the organizations already working on homelessness: Community agencies working on homelessness in our city and county will be an integral part of the plan. Input from those organizations has helped and will continue to inform this process. We believe everyone will benefit from the greater coordination offered by this new approach under the city and county’s leadership.

Learn more: Read the Pathways Home plan here.

How do I contact the team working on this project: You can email Brian Sampson, City of La Crosse Homeless Services Coordinator at [email protected] or Isaac Hoffman, La Crosse Area Family Collaborative Director at [email protected].

Monthly Pathways Updates

08/05/2024

• Pathways Conferencing has been running for its first three months since starting on May 8. This collaborative meeting process allows stakeholders to discuss and coordinate efforts to address the needs of individuals on the Pathways to Housing list. We extend our gratitude to the community partner agencies participating in Pathways Conferencing; they are essential to the Pathways plan. Through greater coordination and collaboration, we can address homelessness in our community. Our community partners include:

• On June 17th, the City of La Crosse launched a request for information to seek partners with innovative ideas for increasing specialized housing capacity. Six responses were received, which will be reviewed in the coming weeks. We appreciate the partners who submitted insightful and comprehensive proposals to help increase housing capacity in our community.  The next step in this process is to move forward with a request for proposals.  The City of La Crosse will launch the request on Aug 19th, 2024. 

• Faith Community outreach sessions were held on July 9th.  There were 22 different organizations in attendance who also have an extended reach to many others.  The group expressed a strong desire to come together again to explore collective ways to support our homeless and unsheltered neighbors, specifically around the prevention and caring connections Pathways.
  

• As we enter quarter 3 of our first-year plan, we focus on maximizing our resources. This involves developing clear "service pathways" to secure housing for those facing common barriers. Our initial pathways include public housing, residential AODA treatment, and case management or housing navigation services. These step-by-step documents will ensure that community case managers have an efficient, streamlined, and predictable process for accessing various services.