Opinion: Creating a future without homelessness requires a community working together. Are you in?

Dee is president and CEO of the San Diego Rescue Mission and lives in Vista.

As the nation’s eighth largest city, San Diego has the fourth largest homeless population, a statistic no one here touts with pride. There are a variety of reasons for the current homeless crisis ranging from a drug and mental health epidemic, low housing vacancy rates, restrictive zoning laws, failed public policy and ineffective management of our homeless resource system. Since 2014, $2 billion has been spent on the San Diego homeless crisis , yet more people are falling into homelessness every month. It’s getting worse, not better.

Can anything be done to fix this humanitarian crisis? Mayor Todd Gloria’s proposal to transform a massive, vacant warehouse into the city’s largest homeless shelter with 1,000 beds is a bold step in the right direction and will help lead some of our unhoused population out of darkness.

Yet we need to do more if we truly want to stop the rising tide of homelessness. It was especially encouraging to read that a top local official wants government out of homelessness services , which is what I’ve been saying to my board of directors for nearly a decade at the helm of the San Diego Rescue Mission . The system is broken, and we need to take another approach. Homelessness is not a government problem to fix, it’s a community issue to address.

As a nonprofit organization, the San Diego Rescue Mission solely relies on the generosity of corporations, churches and private donors to operate. This allows us to focus on achieving outcomes that change lives rather than having to prioritize funding compliance to secure federal and state dollars.

Taking a holistic approach to rehabilitation and recovery, for 70 years, we’ve been providing meals, shelter, clothing, education and job-skills training to the unhoused. We meet people where they are with wrap-around services, trauma-informed care and case management support — and our methods are working. In 2023, we helped: 1,433 people got off the streets immediately, 314 people ended their homelessness permanently, and there were 127 Mission Academy Residential Program graduates — the highest number ever. Year after year, 89 percent of our graduates are still housed, and 132 families stayed safe last year. We also provided 92,974 nights of shelter for men, women and children, 243,961 meals, 150,800 hours of job training, 3,614 hot showers through our Mobile Shower Program, 56 percent of Navigation Center shelter guests with connections to longer-term care or housing, and 11,500 hygiene kits to neighbors on the streets.

Addressing homelessness requires a collective effort within our community. We must collaborate to expand upon these positive results and dedicate resources to three essential areas:

• Deploy strategic outreach. All 18 cities in the county need to share an outreach approach that is intentional, compassionate and coordinated with accountability. You can’t sleep on the streets permanently when help is available. The sidewalk is not a home. The goal should be to build a relationship of trust with the purpose of getting people off the streets, inside a safe place and working to rebuild their lives.
• Launch triage centers. In our 70-year history, we have learned firsthand the need for quality emergency shelters. These triage centers are places to stabilize, assess and build an individual plan for care through case management while providing shelter, meals and showers. We have a 60-bed triage center Downtown and a 50-bed facility in Oceanside, and we are a few months away from opening a 162-bed triage center in National City. We all need to be committed to helping more people get off the streets immediately. The longer someone stays on the street, the more difficult recovery becomes, which is why more 30-day shelters are urgently needed to address an individual’s homelessness.
• Offer rehabilitation. Housing alone will not solve this problem. Homelessness is an issue of the heart and incredibly complex. Every person experiencing homelessness has a different story dealing with a variety of challenges. Through our 300-bed, 12-month Mission Academy program, we invest in life transformation so that people can end their homelessness for good. A holistic approach that involves rehabilitation needs to be at the core of our homeless solutions to address the root of the problem.

Now is the time to rise as a community and take purposeful steps toward a real future in which our homeless crisis is a thing of the past. Together, we can build a better system and provide meaningful solutions for our neighbors experiencing homelessness. All of San Diego deserves more than the status quo.

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune .