Marking a major triumph in the fight against veteran homelessness, Bridges Outreach is celebrating the remarkable first-year success of New Jersey’s Bringing Veterans Home (BVH) initiative. The statewide effort has successfully helped more than 2,500 veterans secure permanent housing since its launch in March 2025.
For the first time, data shows that more veterans in New Jersey are exiting homelessness into permanent housing each month than are entering it, proving that coordinated, housing-focused strategies can effectively solve homelessness.
As the inaugural BVH provider for New Jersey’s Metro Region—covering Essex and Union counties—Summit-based Bridges Outreach joined state leaders to highlight a framework that has fundamentally transformed how vulnerable veterans are served.
Launched through a collaborative partnership between the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA), the New Jersey Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), and regional service providers, the initiative moved away from traditional emergency responses. Instead, it built a coordinated system centered on rapidly identifying unhoused veterans, cutting through bureaucratic hurdles, and moving them directly into permanent housing.
“The success of Bringing Veterans Home proves something we’ve believed for a long time: homelessness is solvable when we build systems that prioritize housing, coordination, and accountability,” Richard Uniacke, president of Bridges Outreach, said. “This initiative wasn’t about managing homelessness more efficiently. It was about creating a system designed to end it for veterans.”
Despite proving that the collaborative model works—even amid a 43.5 percent surge in veterans experiencing homelessness during the same timeframe—funding for the program’s second year has been reduced rather than expanded.
With Bridges’ current BVH grant term concluding on July 31, leadership is urging lawmakers to view the milestone not as a finish line, but as a proof of concept that demands greater financial backing. The urgency is underscored by alarming figures from New Jersey’s public Homelessness Dashboard, which reveals that overall statewide homelessness climbed 32 percent during the first half of the year, while unsheltered homelessness spiked by 61 percent.
“It would be a mistake to treat these results as evidence that the work is finished,” Uniacke emphasized. “At a moment when homelessness is rising across New Jersey, we should be expanding proven solutions, not reducing the resources available to sustain them.”
Headquartered in Summit, New Jersey, Bridges Outreach provides vital street outreach, intensive case management, housing navigation, and stabilization support across Essex, Union, and Somerset counties. The organization works tirelessly to ensure homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring. To learn more or support their mission, visit www.bridgesoutreach.org.
