City of OKC
Home MenuPlease Note: Key to Home does not provide direct assistance such as shelter, food resources, or case management. If you are experiencing homelessness, please complete a housing assessment through one of Key to Home's partners. If you are already on the waitlist for housing, you can maintain your active status by contacting a provider listed in the link above. Read more information on what to do while you wait.
Everyone deserves a place to call home
The Key to Home Partnership, a collaboration of more than 50 organizations, is working together to prevent and end homelessness in Oklahoma City. Together, we aim to serve as the collective voice for homelessness in our community.
The City of Oklahoma City serves as the lead agency for the Key to Home Partnership. Our goal is to educate our community on the issue of homelessness and lead the development and coordination of community strategies to ensure that homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring in OKC. By driving strategy through collaboration, data-driven decisions, and the voice of those with lived experience, we can ensure that our response is both appropriate and effective. The City of OKC works directly with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to allocate federal funds across the partnership to support programs that provide shelter, housing, and supportive services to people experiencing homelessness in OKC.
Key to Home is a public-private partnership that allows us to leverage the generosity of private donations to fill gaps that public funds cannot cover. We believe that together, we can create and sustain a community where homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring through strong public/private partnerships, supporting collaboration among stakeholders, using data to guide our strategy, and educating the public on homelessness and its solutions.
How is Key to Home different than what we've done before?
One way Key to Home is addressing homelessness differently is by increasing the number of pathways to housing, expanding the ways in which we can reach people and provide access points to resources.
We’ve had traditional pathways to housing for years, including:
- Getting connected through an emergency shelter
- Calling 211
- Getting connected through a youth shelter
- Outreach
These pathways have been highly successful in moving people into housing, with 1,473 individuals being housed through these pathways in 2023.
So what’s the problem? While these pathways are crucial in moving people out of the homeless response system and into housing with supportive services, we are currently only able to curtail the growth of our homeless population with existing pathways. Reasons for this vary but driving factors include:
1) we have a distinct challenge of the inflow into the system increasing, meaning we currently have more people entering than exiting the system.
2) the subpopulation made up of long-term, unsheltered homeless individuals has been growing in recent years. This causes a bottleneck in the system, because in general the longer a person remains unhoused, the higher the level of intervention needed to end their homelessness. As the number of people who are long-term homeless and needing more support grows, it makes it difficult for others to move through the system efficiently.
The Encampment Rehousing Initiative was successfully piloted in early 2023 and launched in September 2023 to provide a new pathway to housing for chronically homeless individuals sleeping outside. With this new pathway to housing, partners are going directly into encampments and working to house everyone within 4-6 weeks. We know that the longer a person is homeless, the number of barriers to housing for that person significantly increases. By prioritizing those who are chronically homeless and unsheltered we are creating greater capacity within the system to serve our homeless neighbors more effectively and efficiently. Through this new initiative we are on track to house 500 of our unsheltered neighbors by the end of 2025.
Beyond the Encampment Rehousing Initiative, the Key to Home Partnership is focused on developing and coordinating community strategies to continue progress in reducing homelessness in Oklahoma City.