Community Foundation awarded $7.3 million grant from Lilly Endowment to reduce unsheltered homelessness in Monroe County

The Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County (CFBMC) has received a Community Leadership Implementation Grant of $7,394,505 from Lilly Endowment Inc. through the eighth phase of the Endowment’s Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow (GIFT VIII) statewide initiative. Through GIFT VIII, Lilly Endowment is supporting the efforts of community foundations and their partners to strengthen quality of life for the people in the towns, cities, counties, and regions they serve.

With this grant, CFBMC will collaborate with Heading Home of South Central Indiana, the South Central Community Action Program (SCCAP), agencies in the South Central Housing Network, and other local partners to advance evidence-based strategies focused on reducing Monroe County’s population of individuals and families experiencing unsheltered homelessness through increased case management, street outreach, and landlord engagement and other homelessness diversion and prevention efforts. This implementation grant is one of two that CFBMC received through the GIFT VIII initiative.

From 2019 to 2024, Monroe County’s population of individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness—those sleeping in city parks, cars, encampments, abandoned buildings, and on the streets —grew by 217%, according to the local point-in-time counts. Dramatic increases in the number of unhoused individuals have strained public resources and overburdened social service agencies.

Several years of cross-sector community planning resulted in The Heading Home Plan, A Regional Strategy for Making Homeless Rare, Brief, and Non-Repeating (2021), and The Housing Action Plan for Bloomington/Monroe County (2024). CFBMC also utilized Lilly Endowment GIFT VIII Community Leadership planning grant funding to further explore high-impact solutions to reduce unsheltered homelessness in Monroe County.

Within these studies and plans, a shared case management approach was identified among the most actionable strategies to reduce unsheltered homelessness and divert at-risk individuals and households into stable housing.

Funds from the GIFT VIII Implementation grant will embed 10 case managers throughout the community within partner agencies that work most closely with unhoused individuals. These case managers will use a strengths-based Housing First approach to helping people experiencing unsheltered homelessness and households at risk of a severe housing crisis. Case managers will provide access to resources, help reduce or prevent risk agents (such as medical issues, job loss, challenges with transportation and childcare, etc.), and work with individuals and families to build success plans for long-term housing security. Heading Home will be the coordinating entity for the housing case managers as well as other positions dedicated to this initiative.

In addition to case management, this grant will support a pilot of a Housing Stability Income Supplement Program for families at risk of losing stable housing and provide match funding to grow the Community Foundation’s Housing Security Endowment Fund to ensure long-term sustainability of efforts to address unsheltered homelessness.

“On behalf of the Foundation and our entire community, I want to share how incredibly grateful we are to Lilly Endowment for this significant grant,” said CFBMC President and CEO Tina Peterson. 

“Unsheltered homelessness is a public health and safety crisis impacting not just those living on the streets but our entire community,” added Peterson. “For several years, we have been focused on this unprecedented crisis, engaging with key partners to identify intentional, evidence-based strategies and supporting the development of Heading Home to coordinate activities that strengthen housing security in our community. This grant from Lilly Endowment will help mitigate the current crisis of unsheltered individuals and enable our community to begin implementing promising long-term strategies to improve housing security in Monroe County.”

Mary Morgan, the director of Heading Home of South Central Indiana, added that this grant will support a comprehensive, community-wide cross-sector approach. “Key partners from local government, public safety, healthcare, and social services have all shown a deep commitment to working together to help individuals and families in crisis,” said Morgan. “We know this won’t be easy, but our coalition is optimistic that by working together we can implement systemwide changes to move people more quickly into housing with the support services they need to keep them stably housed.”

CFBMC’s grant from the Endowment is one of 30 implementation grants being awarded through GIFT VIII. CFBMC was also awarded a second Community Leadership Implementation GIFT VIII Grant from Lilly Endowment to strengthen the quality and capacity of early childhood education programs within 10 counties of the Indiana Uplands region. Read more about this grant.

In 1990, Lilly Endowment launched the Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow (GIFT) initiative to help establish and further develop community foundations throughout Indiana. Lilly Endowment hoped that Indiana’s community foundations could enhance the quality of life in their communities by convening conversations among people of diverse ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, occupations, races, and cultural traditions about their communities’ most compelling needs and opportunities, as well as the best ways to address them.