St. Francis House’s SSVF program serves all 75 counties in the State of Arkansas with offices in Little Rock, Jonesboro, and Fayetteville. In FY2023 (October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023), we served a total of 563 unduplicated Veteran households throughout the State of Arkansas. Unduplicated means that repeat enrollments of the same Veteran household are not counted. Of these, 389 households were Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) cases, meaning they came to us in a living situation that is defined as literally homeless under SSVF guidelines. The remaining 174 cases were Homelessness Prevention (HP), meaning they were not considered literally homeless, but they were at imminent risk of literal homelessness.
Also in FY2023, the VA introduced two new performance metrics for SSVF. Both of these metrics focus solely on RRH households. The first metric, known as SSVF3, counts the number of RRH households exiting the program. The goal is that 70% of RRH households exiting the program are residing in Permanent Housing (PH) at the time of exit. Of the 389 RRH households St. Francis House SSVF served in FY23, 265 households exited our program. Of these, 199 households were in Permanent Housing (PH) at exit. That is a 75.09% success rate, exceeding the target of 70%.
The second performance metric, known as SSVF4, counts the number of RRH households placed in Permanent Housing in the fiscal year, with a goal of 75% of those placements occurring within 90 days of program enrollment. St. Francis House SSVF placed a total of 249 RRH households in PH in FY23, with 213 of those placements occurring within 90 days of enrollment for an astounding 85.54% score! We aren’t referring to this as “success rate” because even though the other 36 households took longer than 90 days to find housing, they still got housed–and that is success!