Local homeless‑service providers and the Fargo Moorhead Coalition to End Homelessness told HUD officials they are expanding coordinated efforts to move people from emergency shelter into permanent housing but need more flexible supportive services and targeted rental assistance.

Why it matters: Providers and the coalition said slow movement into permanent housing and limited supportive services create a bottleneck at shelters and increase returns to homelessness. They asked HUD to support flexible, service‑rich approaches that pair housing with health, recovery and employment services.

Rob Swears, executive director at New Life Center, described a mix of short‑term emergency shelter and longer‑term programs, including a recovery program that lasts about a year. “We had 792 unique individuals last year. 421 of them were new to us,” Swears said, underlining high turnover and the limits of emergency shelter alone.

Erin Procno, CEO of the YWCA, said domestic violence and sexual assault are leading causes of homelessness among women and children and described a “continuum of services” at the YWCA that includes prevention, emergency shelter and short‑term rental assistance.

Chandler Eslinger of the Fargo Moorhead Coalition said outreach teams and data collection identified roughly 100 people living unsheltered locally; the coalition has identified a subset of about 20 “highest users” of emergency and public services and arranged funding to house them by the end of the month in a targeted intervention. “We estimate there are about 100 people who are living unsheltered in the Fargo Moorhead area, and of those 100 people we’ve been able to identify about 20 individuals who are the highest users of emergency services,” Eslinger said.

Providers described models they hope HUD will support, including shared intake identifiers to avoid repeated paperwork, integrated data MOUs between housing and health services to address Medicaid confidentiality issues, and flexible short‑term rental assistance to stabilize households moving out of homelessness.

Discussion vs. decision: No formal funding decisions were made at the meeting. Providers said they will continue to pursue local fundraising and partnerships; HUD officials encouraged cross‑sector pilots and said they are open to state and local proposals for pilot programs.

What to watch: Local leaders said they want HUD support for pilot programs that integrate housing and health services and for flexibility around supportive services and rental assistance to keep people housed.