Purpose Built Families Foundation’s Operation Sacred Trust initiative is a nationally accredited, public-private partnership for homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing.
Since 2011, Operation Sacred Trust, OST, has led the way preventing and ending homelessness for Veteran families in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, helping reduce homelessness among our community’s former servicemen and women by more than 50 percent.
From inception, OST has been a collaboration of visionary social service leaders from diverse agencies and organizations working together towards a common commitment: Ending Veteran Homelessness. Today, with grant funding and guidance from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Supportive Services for Veteran Families Program (“SSVF”), OST operations are led by seasoned professionals from nonprofits Purpose Built Families Foundation and Carrfour Supportive Housing with active support from the University of Miami’s School of Law, local Continuums of Care, and scores of community partners.
Stephanie Berman-Eisenberg, Carrfour’s President/CEO, said Operation Sacred Trust will help place homeless Veterans in appropriate permanent housing and develop the resources to maintain housing stability. For low-income Veteran families facing threats to housing stability, she said the community-centered initiative will help them improve social role functioning, interpersonal relationships, decrease symptom distress, and access a range of supportive services to help them enter affordable housing or stay in their current homes.
Berman-Eisenberg’s husband, Seth Eisenberg, is CEO of PAIRS Foundation. He said the organization’s work with Veteran families nationwide has shown evidence-based marriage and relationship education that strengthens family resiliency is important to lasting housing stability.
“Family and marital breakdown is a leading cause of poverty and homelessness,” Seth Eisenberg said. “Helping low-income Veteran families improve communication, emotional understanding, and healthy conflict resolution skills gives them vital resources to interrupt events that lead to homelessness. Combining these services with access to affordable housing is the foundation to ending homelessness for America’s Veteran families,” he added.
Despite the boost in resources, the Eisenberg’s said ending Veteran homelessness in South Florida will not happen overnight.
“Our community’s veterans deserve the very best of all of us to help them have the opportunities for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ they fought to defend for our families. That will take a sustained, collaborative, multi-year approach that focuses increasing resources towards our commitment to veterans,” Stephanie Berman-Eisenberg said.
“Veterans are counting on us to honor our sacred trust in actions,” Seth Eisenberg added. “Nearly half of the 700 veterans homeless on any given night in South Florida don’t have shelter. Reaching, engaging and serving these most vulnerable, unsheltered veterans is our most urgent priority. For each of them, housing is a life and death issue.”
“That should keep us all up at night,” he said.
The Eisenberg’s said the vision for Operation Sacred Trust evolved out of Stephanie Berman-Eisenberg’s experience developing supportive housing to disrupt homelessness for very low income Miami families and Seth Eisenberg’s work with military families impacted by long service deployments and veterans struggling to keep their lives together after significant combat exposure in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“When you’ve seen firsthand the price our military families have paid, helping them succeed when they come home becomes a sacred trust,” Stephanie Berman-Eisenberg said.
“They’ve earned much more than committees, studies, speeches and thank-you’s,” Seth Eisenberg said. “Operation Sacred Trust is about the very real work needed 24/7, 365 days a year for as long as it takes for those who have borne the battle and their loved ones. Whatever we have to figure out, whatever it takes, together, we have an obligation to succeed, and we will. There’s no other choice.”
