The Homeless Coalition provides a space for collaboration and information sharing for the homeless community and social service providers.  Our coordination of services activities allows for social services agencies, advocates and individuals who are un-housed alike to come together and address the problems of homelessness in our communities.

 

General Body

A Coalition is a group of people moving collectively in the same direction, working to achieve the same goals.  People and organizations cannot be a Coalition without coming together and working together.  Every third Thursday of the month at 1:30pm, the heart and soul of the Coalition, General Body, gathers.  Throughout this past year, our Member-organizations sent representatives each month.  Together we were able to discover common issues we were all facing and create collective strategies to reach solutions.

General Body served as a place to be heard, create and lead to action.  We made decisions about how to restore funding and how to support social services under attack. We worked on defending the rights of Tenants, the struggle for jobs and demanding deserved opportunity for families and children facing homelessness. We plan how to push new policies all focused on our mission to eradicate and prevent homelessness.  We grew in our knowledge of how to stand together and push forward.

If you would like to join in the movement, please consider becoming a member of the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition.

Winter Shelter

For years the Cold Shelter was mandated by City Council, but funds were not allocated to it.  The Health Department and Recreation Commission did the best they could with what little funds they had available.  As a result, the Cold Shelter only opened at zero degrees wind-chill or lower.  Several years ago we advocated and the Cold Shelter began opening at below 10 degrees wind-chill.  Two years ago after the Recreation Commission ran out of money to fund the shelter, because Council would invest none, we stepped in and private dollars were given to keep it open.  In 2010 with a collective group of organizations, we were able to raise enough dollars to have, for the first time, trained shelter workers, supervised by the Drop Inn Center, at the Cold Shelter.  Each winter since 2010 we have raised enough support to have the Cold Shelter, now called the Winter Shelter, open for 90 nights in a row each year.  No longer will people have to wonder if they can be warm at night.  Cincinnati has now moved from being categorized as the largest metropolitan city with the worst response to winter in the state to representing a model of growth.