JOIN’s Outreach Services Program strives to emphasize the strengths and support the efforts of homeless individuals to transition off the street. We address this need by encouraging individuals to attend to the issues at the root of their homelessness and actively supporting their decisions to do so.  We provide basic support services while they are in transition and we support their housing searches with personal advocacy and payment of move-in fees where appropriate. There are several challenges we face in meeting this goal: the scarcity of low-income housing and the restrictive criteria of most low-income housing programs: rental application screening processes based on credit, criminal, and eviction histories; high initial move-in expenses; and the longer term challenge of sustaining successful transitions.

We meet the challenges regarding low-income units by emphasizing private market units.  JOIN mitigates the screening challenge by building relationships with landlords.  These landlords can and do make decisions to waive their normal screening process for the people with whom JOIN works.  They do so because they recognize JOIN's demonstrated commitment to be in relationship with both new tenant and landlord can help create long-term tenants.  JOIN's post placement engagement leads to high rates of housing retention successes and lowers unit turnover and vacancy rates.  High move-in costs are overcome by one-time payments of a portion of these costs by JOIN.  Retention challenges are met by developing and continuing to provide access to supportive services to help stabilize new tenants in their housing.