There are over 5,000 homeless families with children in the Puget Sound region spending an average of 8 months moving from shelter to shelter. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is working to cut homelessness in half by 2020. The mission is to make homelessness rare, brief, and one time. To assist in this mission, the main objectives of the eScience project are to:

  • Identify the barriers and key drivers leading to homeless families finding permanent housing

  • Identify trend, seasonality, business cycle, and variation of entry and exit rates into and out of homeless shelters

  • Identify factors that increase / decrease a family’s length of stay in a homeless shelter

  • This research will be used to inform BMGF leadership, county data leads, and city officials to improve decision making and prioritization of resources to improve the odds of homeless families finding permanent housing.