This article is written by Chris Schlaffman, Aaron Sheets, chief executive officer of HopeLink of Southern Nevada.

Hope. More than 90,000 households in the Las Vegas valley at risk of homelessness are seeking hope. Hope is what we do, our purpose, our mission. Hope is who we are because Hope Changes Everything.

Our hope arrives in the form of tangible services for our friends and neighbors in crisis, including rent, deposit, utility, and mortgage assistance to prevent families and individuals from the experience of homelessness. Emergency shelter services immediately place our citizens in a safe bed, and rapid rehousing provides a permanent residence to heal, reestablish themselves and their pathway to stability.

Preventing homelessness, preserving families, and providing hope is a mission for more than those we serve. It is also for you. When everyone in our community thrives, you and your family thrive too.

Our focus remains on providing services and creating programs that will help families and individuals remain whole, disrupting their lives as little as possible. Our rental assistance programs are the most effective in keeping residents housed in Nevada, and we continue to seek out new revenue sources to support families and seniors in need.

To meet the growing need, within the next three years we will enlarge our staff to serve more than 40,000 people, including a concerted outreach to seniors who have been acutely affected by the rising cost of living. We will expand our facilities to meet the increased caseload and staffing needs and we will establish a $6,000,000 endowment to ensure hope for people in crisis long into the future.

Our newest outreach program serves over 500 Lake Mead West Apartment residents with all the services we provide at our Family Resource Center using our model which attaches case management to affordable housing – a model we believe will become more prominent in the future. Additionally, Pura Vida Senior Living breaks ground next door in 2024 with HopeLink providing intensive case management services onsite for a low-income senior community. Cooperative partnerships are a winning business strategy in the non-profit world.

The 2023 community count revealed that there are more than 6,500 unsheltered members in our community on any given night. Many believe this is a grossly underreported number. Evidence shows the most effective and least expensive way to prevent homelessness is to provide rent, utility, and deposit and mortgage assistance, along with other supportive services designed to keep people safely housed where they are—services HopeLink is equipped to provide.

An acute need exists for senior assistance. Because fixed senior incomes are outpaced by the cost of living, residents are being evicted from their homes in staggering numbers. When people become homeless, the costs of re-housing them skyrockets tenfold. When senior citizens become homeless, it immediately becomes a life-threatening situation.

Which means our 2024 plans include renewing Hope4Seniors, a package of assistance and services designed specifically for the fixed-income elderly in our community. Their ability to survive the rising costs of living has become more threatened than ever before in the history of southern Nevada.

There remains much work to be done, as inflation continues to outpace incomes causing many in southern Nevada to become rent burdened. Our seniors and our neighbors surviving on low and fixed incomes are particularly at risk in our current state. We are continuously working with our federal, county, and jurisdictional partners on ways that we can keep them housed and fed, with the lights on.

Our dedicated case managers assist families, individuals and seniors in crisis with a continuum of services including emergency food assistance, bus passes for work or medical appointments, Nevada IDs, work cards, birth certificates, prescription co-pays, senior specific services, as well as referrals for assistance from hundreds of community resources including mental health, legal assistance, low-cost medical clinics, and many other areas of need.

On average each year, HopeLink provides 500 individuals with emergency shelter, helps the community with 1,000 free tax returns, 2,000 households with food assistance, writes 5,000 checks to prevent homelessness and utility shut offs, and so much more.

We meet them where they are no matter their history or issues, show them their strengths, lift them out of homelessness, give them job skills, and help them find employment so that they can realize financial stability. At HopeLink, our integrated approach to preventing homelessness and its recurrence changes the normal for families, children, and seniors immediately, and then for a lifetime.

In any crisis, people need to know there is always hope. Hope is the first and most important currency that leads people to recovery from hardship. Hope is the exchange within which our staff is both passionate and fluent. At HopeLink, our integrated approach to preventing homelessness and its recurrence changes the normal for more families, children, and seniors immediately, and then for a lifetime. We have been, and still are, southern Nevada’s number one provider of hope.

At HopeLink, we feel strongly that businesses have an important role to play in being good stewards within the community as well as to their employees. By partnering with a non-profit organization, such as ours, businesses can create a ‘link2hope’ between themselves and those in need. If you would like more information on how you can support our work visit link2hope.org or call 702-566-0576 ext. 314.