REDUCING BARRIERS

At its heart, the Housing First approach is about tearing down the barriers of policy or practice that stand between people and what they need as human beings. Housing First is about making resources more accessible to people who are struggling. 

This does not mean that every community has sufficient capacity to house every person who wants housing; it also doesn’t mean that people should be required to be in housing before they are allowed access to other forms of support. Rather, and especially for LEAD, it means that everyone involved should be constantly committed to trying to connect people to the resources they need as readily as possible, whenever possible. This means thinking creatively, adaptively, and oftentimes unconventionally to recognize and remedy the sometimes invisible barriers erected through established policy and common practice.

This means that at all times, LEAD stakeholders should be driven by a simple question: What can we do, in any given circumstance, that would actually help?