Kaiser Permanente And MWVCAA Partner For Project HOME--an Innovative New Housing Initiative -03/07/22

Providing housing assistance to 100 chronically homeless individuals by 2023

SALEM, OR – Kaiser Permanente and Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency (MWVCAA) have teamed up to further address the housing epidemic with Project HOME—a holistic, wrap-around housing project designed to assist the chronically homeless population in Marion and Polk counties.

Project HOME is supported by a $1.5 million grant to MWVCAA from Kaiser Permanente's National Community Benefit Fund at the East Bay Foundation. The initiative will be led by the ARCHES Project, MWVCAA’s homeless outreach and sheltering division.

Project HOME was created with the goal of helping unhoused individuals and families secure permanent housing, improve their mental and physical health, and help reduce their dependency on services such as emergency care and law enforcement to address their chronic conditions and daily needs. 

“Our rates of chronic homelessness in Salem are considerably higher than other communities in Oregon. Recent figures show about 64% of our homeless population is experiencing chronic homelessness, which is almost double the national average. This program in particular will be one of the largest housing programs for our homeless in Salem’s history,” said Jimmy Jones, Executive Director of Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency. 

The Marion-Polk region is one of three communities across the nation receiving Kaiser Permanente funding for the Project HOME initiative. Kaiser Permanente selected MWVCAA and the greater-Salem area based on the rise in chronically homeless individuals and limited affordable housing, and MWVCAA’s expertise and readiness to implement this work. 

“We know that housing is a key driver of health and that’s why we are working with partners like Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency to improve the health and well-being of the communities we serve, including our members,” said Jeff Collins president of Kaiser Permanente Northwest. “As a health care organization, Kaiser Permanente recognizes that individuals who are homeless have a higher rate of hospital readmissions and emergency room visits while also suffering from poorer health outcomes and higher mortality rates.”

Project HOME will include efforts to support Kaiser Permanente members and the community in Marion and Polk counties who are experiencing homelessness or at risk of becoming homeless. The ARCHES team will work with Kaiser Permanente’s local medical teams to identify high-risk individuals and bring them into the program. As the program evolves, focus will expand to other populations with the goal of connecting over a 100 individuals with long-term stable housing and support services by the end of 2023.

Ashley Hamilton, Director of the ARCHES Project at Community Action, said, “We know that many in our unsheltered population experience worsening health conditions as a result of limited access to medical services while also lacking safe housing needed for recovery or health management. Programs like Project HOME that connect health systems and housing are all the more critical when creating solutions to end homelessness.”

Project HOME is the newest project to come from the partnership with Kaiser Permanente and Mid-Willamette Valley. Other collaborations to address housing and homelessness include Redwood Crossing supportive housing development; Connect Oregon, a close-loop social services referral network; and Built for Zero, a data-driven initiative to help evolve how local homeless response systems work. 

“We’re proud to partner once again with Kaiser Permanente, to help identify the medically fragile among our homeless neighbors and help them connect to housing,” said Jones. “We have lost far too many of our unsheltered to needless deaths the past two years. This project helps to connect our unhoused neighbors to a warm, safe place to call home, where they’ll be able to live with dignity and access the support they need to regain their health.”

Kaiser Permanente’s mission is to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve. We currently serve 12.4 million members in 8 states and the District of Columbia.

Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency is Marion-Polk’s anti-poverty agency and the area’s leading non-profit social services provider. Our programs provide services in housing and homelessness, childcare and youth development, and incarceration reentry.