# Enhancing Community Integration for Homeless Veterans

> **NIH VA I50** · VA GREATER LOS ANGELES HEALTHCARE SYSTEM · 2020 · —

## Abstract

Homelessness in Veterans is a widespread, vexing problem, and a priority at the national level. Despite
substantial progress in providing housing for Veterans, a fundamental problem remains: Permanent housing is
a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for successful community integration. Community integration
includes: 1) social integration (i.e., contact with family and friends) and 2) work outcome (maintaining
productive activities in work or school). Providing housing is only the first step in facilitating recovery among
homeless Veterans; once housed, they need different types of assistance to integrate into communities.
For these reasons we established a REAP at GLA. Its mission is to understand and to improve community
integration in homeless and recently-housed Veterans. The REAP mission has been enacted by establishing
an interdisciplinary community of researchers, educators, and clinicians to generate intervention and
translational research to improve community integration for these Veterans. The translational research involves
the application of cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience approaches to better understand community
integration and to guide treatment development. This REAP fills a critical gap -- rather than focusing on factors
that confer risk for homelessness in Veterans, this team of investigators applies their skills to the neglected
problem of community integration for homeless and recently-housed Veterans. The REAP also attracts and
develops clinical researchers and trainees who focus on this critical problem. It is fitting that this REAP is
based at GLA, which has the largest homeless program of any VA in the nation, serving 7,449 homeless
Veterans in FY18.
The REAP mission consists of several components:
 Research: This REAP supports translational studies to understand the nature of work and social
community integration in homeless Veterans, and also intervention studies to rigorously evaluate innovative
treatments to enhance community integration for these individuals.
 Training: This REAP encourages postdoctoral fellows and early career investigators to focus their
professional talents on the topic of homelessness and community integration in Veterans. This goal is reflected
in the Pilot Grant program and through multi-disciplinary mentorship.
 Facilitation: The proposed REAP provides support for independent grant submissions. Applications
benefit from the infrastructure, such as recruitment pathways, and a rare collection of expertise in clinical trial
methodology, outcomes research, and cognitive and social neuroscience.
Activities in the next phase of the REAP are guided by key findings from the first phase. In phase 1 of the
REAP, we conducted two independent prospective studies. Both studies found essentially no change in
community integration (family, social, and work) over 12 months in GLA homeless programs. This lack of
change occurred at the group level; it is clear that provision of housing is ben...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9821724
- **Project number:** 2I50RX001875-06
- **Recipient organization:** VA GREATER LOS ANGELES HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
- **Principal Investigator:** Michael F. Green
- **Activity code:** I50 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** VA
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** —
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2015-05-01 → 2020-09-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9821724

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9821724, Enhancing Community Integration for Homeless Veterans (2I50RX001875-06). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9821724. Licensed CC0.

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