Mission Statement

The Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition is a unified social action agency, fully committed to its ultimate goal: the eradication of homelessness with respect for the dignity and diversity of its membership, people experiencing homelessness and the community. Our Coalition works towards this goal by coordinating services, educating the public, and engaging in grassroots organizing and advocacy.

History

The Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless (GCCH) was formed in May of 1984 for one purpose: the eradication of homelessness in Cincinnati. What started out as a coalition of 15 volunteers meeting weekly in an unheated church basement has since grown into a Coalition of over 60 agencies, and hundreds of individual members and supporters. Today, we are more commonly known as the Homeless Coalition.

Our Areas of Work

Coordination of Services: By coordinating services within the community, we help our member agencies provide their services, share their resources, and work with people experiencing homelessness.

Advocacy: The Homeless Coalition works with local officials, the community, and people experiencing homelessness, to ensure the preservation of rights, to reverse the trend of the criminalization of homelessness, and to enact just social policy to end homelessness. We are a regional site for the National Homeless Civil Rights Organizing Project, which seeks to document and end hate crimes against people experiencing homelessness and to educate and organize people experiencing homelessness to protect their civil rights.

Education: Through our education opportunities and resources, we provide the groundwork for understanding the complexities of homelessness so that our community can work towards sustainable solutions. For more than twenty years, we have been providing educational opportunities to churches, companies, schools, and universities throughout the Cincinnati region.

Streetvibes is a bi-weekly newspaper, produced by the Homeless Coalition, that covers issues of homelessness, social justice, and poverty. Streetvibes Distributors purchase papers for 75 cents and sell them to the public for a $2.00 donation, keeping the profit they have earned.