Lorain's Valor Home gets portion of federal grant
LORAIN — Valor Home, which assists homeless veterans with housing and meals as well as a hand in gaining employment and with addiction and mental health issues, will get continued financial assistance.
The 30-bed West 21st Street facility is one of a number of veterans’ housing facilities that will benefit from an $818,629 grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs through its Supportive Services for Veteran Families program that works to help thousands of low-income veterans and their families.
As announced Thursday by U.S. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo, the Supportive Services program grant sustains part of the VA’s “Housing First Strategy” which has helped cut the incidence of veteran homelessness almost in half since 2010, according to VA Secretary Robert A. McDonald.
Kaptur is a senior member of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, which funds and has oversight responsibilities for the VA.
Locally, the grant will aid veterans and their families in Lorain, Medina, Summit, Portage, Trumbull and Mahoning counties, according to Matt Slater, director of veteran services for Family and Community Services Inc., a nonprofit based in Ravenna that operates Valor Home and similar veterans’ transitional housing facilities in Akron, Kent and Ravenna.
A major goal of the center is to try to make sure that veterans who have found themselves without a home do not repeat the experience.
“We know we will always have homeless veterans, but the idea is to try and see that when it does happen that it is brief, rare, and does not happen again,” Slater said.
Steps taken to prevent repeat occurrences of homelessness include providing utility and security deposits and payment of a first month’s rent, Slater said.
Other assistance includes legal aid services for veterans along with individual case management.
“If someone gets an eviction notice, we do not just pay the rent, we work with them to make sure the rent is paid and that there is the potential of paying more rent,” Slater said.
The grant is a renewal of funding for the Supportive Services program that doesn’t fix exact sums of money for any one facility or service.
“The good thing about it is that it is flexible and based on need,” Slater said. “If there is a dip in one area with less need, then more money can go to another area where the need is greater.”
Open for nearly two years, Valor Home is a two-story, 21,000-square-foot facility. Its 30, one-person bedrooms are designed to house homeless veterans for up to two years. While there, veterans may take advantage of a spacious upper-level dining room, bathrooms and a computer lab they can use to communicate with family members, prepare resumes, hunt for jobs and take online courses.
A TV lounge offers a large-screen TV donated by the family of Todd Beamer, a 32-year-old man aboard United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.
Beamer helped rally fellow passengers to storm the airliner’s cockpit in efforts to wrest control of the plane from terrorists planning to crash it in Washington, D.C. The aircraft eventually went down in a field near Shanksville, Pa.