Cuyahoga County has received more than $2 million to help stop homelessness among military veterans. The Department of Veteran Affairs grant is part of a nationwide effort to help put homeless veterans and their families into permanent housing. From Ohio Public Radio station WKSU, Kevin Niedermier reports.
The funding for Cuyahoga County will be used for support services to prepare homeless veterans for housing.
Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless director Brian Davis says concentrated efforts like this in recent years have reduced the county’s homeless veteran population to about 200.
Davis: “There’s probably multiple barriers to stability and we need to work with them to try to figure out how we take care of their health issues, their debt issues and maybe even their criminal background to make them stable and be able to be self-employed, or to be in some kind of a job to get into housing.”
Summit County is getting more than $280,000 for homeless veteran services from the V.A. program.
Altogether, the V.A. program is distributing more than $300 million across the country.