Madison and Dane County are taking the next step in reducing homelessness, joining a nationwide initiative aimed at ending chronic and veteran homelessness within the next two years.

The program, Zero: 2016, is a national initiative coordinated by the Community Solutions organization, Communications Director Jake Maguire said.

“The goal is really simple: to help communities get all the way to zero in terms of chronic and veteran homelessness in the next two years,” Maguire said. “The president has outlined a federal plan to end chronic homelessness by the end of 2015 [and] veteran homelessness by the end of 2016, so what we want to do is leverage those federal goals to help communities boost their local efforts.”

Maguire said veteran homelessness refers to anyone who is experiencing homelessness and has also served in the army. Currently there are less than 50,000 veterans on the street, and this is only the first time since Vietnam that this number has been under 50,000. This shows that progress is being made, Maguire said.

Chronic homelessness, on the other hand, is anyone who has been homeless either for a year or more, or experienced homelessness four or more times in the past three years, Maguire said.

To qualify for the resources offered through each individual cities’ involvement in the Zero: 2016 program, members must be experiencing one of the above categories of homelessness as well as a health condition, Maguire said. Health conditions include mental illness and severe substance addiction, he said.

Jim O’Keefe, division director for Madison’s Community Development Division, said joining this program is just a continuation of the current efforts to alleviate homelessness, which Mayor Paul Soglin and the city of Madison have been involved in.

Along with joining Zero: 2016, O’Keefe said Soglin has committed to embarking on a “fairly significant affordable housing development.”

“[This effort] is part of a growing recognition that [homelessness] is becoming an increasingly difficult problem and in the Madison and Dane County area,” O’Keefe said. “We are spending a lot of money in this community to try to address some of the needs of homeless populations in an effort to better coordinate how those resources are used and really try to solve the problem rather than just dealing with the subjects.”

O’Keefe said the Zero: 2016 program emphasizes a coming together of ideas, not necessarily resources. He said the real success of the program will be through communications with other cities that are also involved in Zero: 2016 and then sharing “approaches, systems and practices” with these other cities.

While Madison has already begun to focus attention on reducing homelessness in Dane County, O’Keefe said the next step is to identify specific barriers that Madison’s homeless face in regards to housing, and to improve communications with other cities that are also tackling this epidemic.

Helping reducing homelessness by coordinating efforts with other communities is a big part of the overall effort, O’Keefe said.

“That [communication] is a really big part of what folks have begun working on, and I think that will really be important in trying to be successful in trying to reach that goal of ending chronic homelessness by 2016,” he said.