Photo from the Pay for Success launch event: Mike Durkin (right), Governor Deval Patrick (center), and Joe Finn of MHSA (left).

Everyone deserves a safe and stable place to call home. For decades, United Way has worked alongside partners across Massachusetts to make this a reality, advancing bold, evidence-based solutions to homelessness and fighting to protect that progress in moments of uncertainty and change.   

In the early 2000s, we realized Massachusetts faced a fundamental problem: our decades-old shelter system was managing homelessness – not ending it. 

We needed a new approach. 

So when we were invited by the Romney Administration to co-chair the Massachusetts Housing and Homelessness Task Force, we joined civic leaders in putting forward a bold proposal grounded in research and in our belief that everyone deserves to live with dignity and access to opportunity: Massachusetts should move from a “shelter-based” approach to a “Housing First” model.  

Housing First is an approach that provides people with permanent housing without preconditions like sobriety or treatment. It’s based on a simple but transformational philosophy that everyone is “housing ready,” and that the way to solve the homelessness crisis is, fundamentally, by providing housing.  

Imagine trying to achieve requirements for housing support without having a home – how much harder it might be to stay consistent in a treatment program or prepare for a job interview, for example, when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep that night. Housing First means supplying a home as a foundation for achieving these other goals. It lets our neighbors who have experienced homelessness focus on achieving long-term stability, get the support they need to do so, and live with dignity. It recognizes that housing should not be a reward for stability, it’s what makes stability possible. 

At first, not everyone was on board with this idea. To some policymakers and providers, Housing First felt counterintuitive. But research showed it was an effective and cost-efficient response to homelessness. In 2007, we worked with the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance (MHSA) and One Family to center Housing First in Massachusetts. United Way raised $1 million with the real estate industry to launch a three-year pilot to help 13 shelter providers adopt or expand the approach. 

The pilot showed strong results. At the end of three years, 77% of 1,200 families who had been helped through the housing first model were still stable, and the model had saved Massachusetts an estimated $3.6 million in shelter costs. 

But our search for creative solutions didn’t stop there. We understood that new approaches to ending homelessness might require new kinds of support. In 2015, we partnered with the Commonwealth, MHSA, and Corporation for Supportive Housing to develop and launch Pay for Success, a first-in-the-nation social impact financing model blending charitable donations with private investment to scale Housing First and supportive housing. By 2021, the initiative exceeded its original goal, securing housing for over 1,000 people with 85% remaining housed after one year.  

Building on that momentum, we helped launch the Supportive Housing Pipeline Coalition, working together with Citizens Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA) and MHSA. The coalition – the first of its kind in Massachusetts – brings together more than 80 nonprofit and for-profit developers, service providers, advocates, and healthcare organizations to work towards the goal of ending and preventing homelessness.  

Today, through our leadership of the Supportive Housing Pipeline Coalition, we’re working to increase supportive housing by 10,000 units. We successfully advocated for the creation of the Supportive Housing Pool Fund in the 2024 Affordable Homes Act, a new tool to streamline and expand the production of housing paired with services for individuals, families, youth and young adults who would otherwise experience homelessness. This year, we are advocating for a $5M state investment to seed this fund to give the Commonwealth greater flexibility to provide resources where they are needed most. 

There’s still a lot of work to do to end homelessness in Massachusetts. The challenges we face today are even greater amid unprecedented uncertainty and instability, as federal policy changes strain the communities who need support and threaten the progress that took decades to build.  

Because of funding shifts and a retreat from the Housing First approach by the federal administration, Massachusetts is projected to lose 2,000-2,500 housing units in calendar year 2027, impacting an estimated 3,800 people. Funding losses from the federal government may be as much as $64 million annually.  

We will keep building on what works. We will keep bringing together leaders across sectors. We will keep taking the data-driven risks that drive real progress until all of our neighbors across the Commonwealth have a stable place to call home.