Finally, tonight, New Jersey has a plan to house all homeless veterans by July 1st of next year.

Military and veterans officials this week began a two day training session, teaching workers from veterans groups how to find those in need and connect them with the right help.

Advocates tell Raven Santana the problem has only worsened in recent years, and now it's time to serve those who served for us.

If it wasn't for Betty Veterans Day in North Dakota, you made.

This place you'd see a lot of.

Formerly homeless veteran James Dolan credits the Bringing Veterans Home Initiative for his second chance at life.

Last fall, the state announced it would begin an initiative to end veteran homelessness within two years, providing more than $30 million in state and federal money to fund services and interventions over a two year period to help place more than a thousand homeless veterans in new Jersey and stable housing.

We will be able to service everybody who is currently homeless, bring those resources back up to their capacity, and that means that anybody who's newly homeless as a veteran will be able to be serviced within about a 30 day period.

That's the goal of functional zero.

Currently, we have 762 homeless veterans in the state of new Jersey as our last point in time count, and we're looking to make sure that we can service all of them by July 1st of 2026 to make sure they're stably housed.

This week, the Commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, Jacquelyn Suarez, co-led a two day training session at the National Guard Training Center and Sea Girt with the New Jersey Department of Military and Veterans Affairs to highlight the initiative's objectives.

From our experience with those veterans who actually utilize our facilities at Veterans Haven South and Veterans Haven North, they they come from a diverse, set of circumstances.

And the only thing, and many things that are common between all of them is their service.

So from having, a hard time, after they leave service, and then life events that exacerbate that, maybe mental mental health issues that were unaddressed because services were not available during the period that they served.

Every situation is different.

So having this kind of targeted, individualized care, is it is unprecedented.

And I think it is why we will be successful.

Commissioner referred to Brigadier General Yvonne Mays says she's confident the program will work based on its tailored approach, where DCA has the lead on this.

Delmarva will take those programs and services that we already have and enhance, the, you know, the good work of DCA.

So, you know, in terms of, having access to veterans communities, communicating the services, coordinating with, you know, through veteran service officers, information and pointing them back to the experts that do this work.

What we are particularly finding with the millennial generation of veterans and also to some Gen-X veterans and the post 911, what is kind of that cohort is kind of conceptualized is that we're really leading cause of homelessness.

Is eviction being asked to leave a shared residence or just a loss of benefits, or just a catastrophic event where just not getting a paycheck for two weeks or being laid off is the precipitating factor that is the entrance to homelessness.

Director of the Office of Homeless Prevention Michael Callahan says the program provides early prevention, in turn preventing long term costs.

And so on average, with this population where just one touch of a week long rapid case management, right, and then some direct client assistance and expenditures, we can often resolve a household homelessness or risk of homelessness for less than $1,200.

And this is Vers versus a long term cost of having to shelter that family, or having to go and have that veteran household be housed using a voucher, right, which can be in the tens of thousands of dollars of cost.

I think this is finally the state really putting its money where its mouth is, that these folks have served us, and it's our turn to serve them.

And we are actually going to capitalize all of our resources, as well as our human capital, to make sure that we can achieve this mission.

In addition to the state's hotline and partners, outreach teams will also engage directly with veterans living in encampments or on shelter conditions who lack access to resources, transportation, or other means, and facilitate direct placement to emergency and permanent housing.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Raven Santana.