Street Outreach Overview

This page is not intended to teach you how to do street outreach. It is an overview of what street outreach entails.

Street outreach involves seeking out people experiencing unsheltered homelessness where they live and providing goods to meet basic needs, while working with the person to connect them with housing and other resources. Street outreach workers look for people living in a range of unsheltered places (e.g., sidewalks, tents, RVs, etc). On this page, we describe street outreach done by a nonprofit or government entity.  

What is Street Outreach?

Street outreach is done by leaving an organization's physical home base to go engage with people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. The key to street outreach is that the outreach worker goes to the client, and the client does not have to come to an office. Some short term goals of street outreach are to develop relationships and meet people’s short-term needs. A long term goal of street outreach is to help people experiencing homelessness move off the street and into stable housing, if that is their desire. 

To achieve the larger goal of helping people experiencing homelessness move off the street and into stable housing, outreach workers build relationships with their clients. They help connect people experiencing homelessness to services in the community (healthcare, housing, hygiene, etc), and help people meet their basic needs by providing goods like water and blankets. Clients may say they do not want to move into housing. An outreach worker supports their decision and continues to provide help to that person. Ideally, the relationship the outreach worker and person form may help that person decide to move into housing. Outreach work should be trauma-informed, person-centered, and culturally competent.