The Erie Women's Fund gathered on Tuesday for some important lessons about the area's homeless problem.

They invited in Wyatt Schroeder, a consultant whose Philadelphia based firm, Hemlock and Forge, is focused on creating more permanent supporting housing all across Pennsylvania.

Schroeder believes there is only one cause of homelessness and that's a loss of housing.

So his mantra is "housing first" - creating more available permanent housing. He says that will get more people off the street more quickly.

But he also recommends supporting housing solutions, that means offering intensive services to help people with their individual risk factors from mental health issues, to substance addiction, domestic issues or the loss of employment.

"We need to change the way that our systems are structured to more rapidly get people off the street into permanent housing with intensive supportive services to get there," Schroeder said.  "And so the conversation today is really to change our own mental models and to realize that people are seeing success around the country. I mean Denver just housed 1,000 people in a very short amount of time, Chattanooga just cut their homelessness in half and we've seen veterans' homelessness from a federal level continue to go down even during the pandemic."

The women's fund offers about $130,000 in grants each year to organizations that empower women and families. Their hope is to support community efforts to develop more permanent housing for Erie County.  Infinite Erie, Hamot Health Foundation, Highmark and Erie city and county government are already working on the idea of developing supportive housing solutions.