Super Support

Fort Wayne Honored by NAHRO

By Mike Sederholm on Nov 14, 2018 in People

Support services can be more effective and valuable to a community when providers work together.

By taking a collective approach to serving needy residents, organizations can identify synergies in services and carefully plan which are best fit for specific clients.

For example, a supportive housing program may have a vacant unit reserved for disabled veterans, and a veterans’ service office may have a client graduating from a transitional housing program. Coordinating those programs would help to smoothly transfer the veteran to the permanent housing unit.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Housing Authority (FWHA) has stepped up to help local organizations work more cooperatively. For its effort, FWHA received an Award of Excellence from the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO).

FWHA assists more than 8,000 individuals in their community at any point in time. Their clients’ needs for assistance go far beyond basic affordable housing subsidies. Some clients are formerly homeless and need assistance furnishing their new permanent homes. Others require access to discounted food and clothing.

In fulfilling those types of client requests, FWHA found itself working with many local service providers. There are more than 150 in the Fort Wayne area, each with a set of services available. George Guy, CEO and director of FWHA, saw an opportunity to benefit the community by getting those providers together with a goal of forming a consortium of representatives that could exchange and coordinate services.

The result of that coordination effort is what’s become known as Housing Strategies Meetings. FWHA invited 270 individuals to the first session, at which attendees saw more than 35 agencies present a high-level overview of their services.

While receiving that program-level information was valuable, personal connections made in the room were also real benefits of the meeting. FWHA compiled contact information for all attendees, including a short summary of services, and created a searchable database to help solidify those connections.

FWHA’s award for designing and hosting these strategy sessions comes from NAHRO’s Community Revitalization category. Programs nominated in this category have a positive economic impact on a neighborhood or city, i.e. balanced growth, economic development, job creation, creative financing, public/private partnerships, mixed-use developments or neighborhood preservation.

Awards of Excellence winners are chosen by national juries and honored at the annual National Conference and Exhibition in October. Awardees represent the very best in innovative programs in assisted housing and community development.