Nonprofit leaders: Rehouse and feed vulnerable people being exited from emergency housing program

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All people deserve access to the basic human needs of food and shelter. We know that the state of Vermont — our government and our people — can make the choice to shelter and feed everyone in Vermont. For the past four years, the state has supported the GA emergency housing program in order to provide shelter to our most vulnerable neighbors. During the Covid-19 pandemic emergency, state agencies contracted with food service companies to provide meals for people housed in hotels, and then established Vermont Everyone Eats, through which restaurant workers and owners proved themselves to be committed, essential and highly effective community food security partners.

The current unhousing crisis is the result of deliberate choices to change Vermont’s policy of providing safe, non-congregate housing to vulnerable people experiencing homelessness. These harmful policy choices can and must be reversed. Government can make policy choices that ensure everyone has housing and food. Taking away the fundamental human rights to shelter and food is immoral and is creating a state emergency that was completely preventable.

When people are unsheltered, they have no way to safely store food or cook for themselves, leaving food access severely limited. By unhousing people, the state is also creating a new hunger crisis and threatening people’s health and lives. Municipalities and service providers across the state are heroically scrambling, yet again, to meet these needs, but many of these entities were already stretched thin before this latest crisis.

We call upon Gov. Scott to declare a state of emergency and immediately reinstate safe, accessible, non-congregate housing for all vulnerable people who have been evicted from hotel housing as a result of the changes made to the GA emergency housing program in Act 113, consistent with the provider letter to Gov. Scott that was released on Sept. 25.

State government has stripped people of safe shelter and access to food, and must immediately reverse course and provide adequate resources to meet people’s essential needs. Gov. Scott and all state agencies must:

-- Provide immediate state funding to community action agencies and other community-based congregate and prepared meal programs so that they can increase their production and distribution of prepared meals to unhoused and marginally housed people.

-- Provide immediate state funding through the Vermont Everyone Eats framework to willing restaurants in communities bearing the brunt of the current state-government-created unhousing crisis, so they can serve as another source of prepared and ready-to-eat meals to keep everyone fed wherever they are.

-- Implement the state option for the SNAP restaurant meals program in Vermont so that it can be in place to support unhoused people and others in need of access to prepared meals through restaurants in future times of crisis, including the everyday crises that keep people from being able to access the food they need.

--Provide immediate state funding to Vermont Foodbank to support food shelves and meal sites who are being asked to meet the surge in demand in their local communities.

As we have seen in recent years, the state can choose to meet the basic needs of all of us living in Vermont. The lack of action by the administration is a failure to care for our most vulnerable neighbors.

We urge Gov. Scott to immediately address this crisis and ensure access to safe, stable shelter and dignified access to food.

List of signers

Anore Horton, executive director, Hunger Free Vermont
Paul Dragon, executive director, Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity
Frank Knaack, executive director, Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont
Sue Minter, executive director, Capstone Community Action
Grace Oedel, executive director, Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont
John Sayles, CEO, Vermont Foodbank
Joshua Davis, executive director, Southeastern Vermont Community Alliance