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Heading Home announces five-year Lilly Endowment grant to expand outreach and landlord engagement in Monroe County region
Summary
Heading Home said it received a five-year Lilly Endowment grant that funded staff growth and program pilots — including six street outreach workers and three diversion case managers — and will support landlord engagement and a housing stability income supplement pilot run through SCAP.
Heading Home of South Central Indiana announced a five-year Lilly Endowment grant that the nonprofit says has expanded its staff and capacity to address homelessness across a six-county region. Tatiana Wheeler, associate director of Heading Home, described the award and the programs it funds during a workshop presentation at a regional housing summit.
"This is a 5-year grant," Wheeler said, adding that the investment allowed Heading Home to grow from a very small staff to a team of 13 by 2025–2026 and now supports six street outreach workers embedded at partner agencies and three diversion and prevention case managers. Wheeler said the grant also funds landlord engagement and unit-acquisition work, endowment matching funds, flexible funding to unify supports for people moving between communities, and a housing stability income supplement pilot administered through SCAP rather than Heading Home itself.
Wheeler described Heading Home as a backbone organization for the regional homeless response system that coordinates crisis services, runs weekly shelter check-in calls, convenes providers for trainings and pursues landlord outreach so that "landlords literally hold the keys to housing." She said the organization has partnered with national efforts to improve data and systems, noting Heading Home’s collaboration with Built for Zero to publish a public data dashboard tracking homelessness in the region. "If you look at the data dashboard today, you'll see that 2026 data is missing," Wheeler said; she added the website and dashboard are being reconstructed and she expected them to be updated within the quarter.
Wheeler framed the grant and related work as investments in practical supports and partnerships: embedding outreach staff at partner agencies, connecting landlords to programs such as the Landlord Risk Mitigation Fund, and providing flexible dollars to move people from unsheltered to stable housing. She urged attendees to consider perspective shifts — "opportunities focus on possibilities" — and to commit to short-term action steps identified during a facilitated sticky-note exercise.
Wheeler also encouraged attendees to consult national examples and resources, citing builtforzero.org and communitiesolutions.org as models of jurisdictions that have reduced homelessness. She closed by directing participants to Heading Home's 2025 impact report via a QR code and inviting further collaboration.
Next steps announced during the session included reconstructing the public data dashboard (targeted within the quarter) and continuing landlord engagement and outreach activities funded by the Lilly Endowment award. Heading Home provided a contact email and asked participants to record near-term commitments on an inspiration wall before lunch.
