Indianapolis One Team’s 2026 Summer Surge

By Shawn Liu, National Homeless Program Manager, Homeless Programs Office

September 10, 2026

Going into the summer of 2026, the homeless program team at the VA Indiana Healthcare System had a problem. Their facility had a year-long goal to permanently house 541 homeless Veterans by September 30, 2026, but was running about a month and a half behind the pace of how many Veterans should have been housed by the end of spring.

Looking for opportunities to accelerate progress and move more homeless Veterans to permanent housing, the VA Indiana team came up with a simple but effective strategy: do another surge!

What are surges?

For the last several years, VA health care systems all across the country have been hosting surge events—time-limited activities where all of the homeless services providers in their community (e.g., VA and community partners) focus their efforts to:

• Reach out to as many unsheltered Veterans as possible and move them to interim or permanent housing, or
• Move as many sheltered and unsheltered Veterans as possible into permanent housing.

Two of VA’s recent nationwide surge efforts included the 2025 Getting Veterans Off the Streets and the 2025 Home for the Holidays initiatives.

Second verse, same as the first

When reflecting on the success of their local Home for the Holidays surge, the team at VA Indiana realized that much of the goodwill, relationships, and infrastructure that came out of organizing the surge six months prior was still intact. That meant doing another surge in the summer would be pretty straightforward.

Helping Veterans And Families (HVAF) of Indiana, Inc.—a local grantee of VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) and Grant and Per Diem (GPD) programs—would take the lead in organizing this summer surge with their Indianapolis One Team partners (e.g., VA Indiana and the other SSVF and GPD grantees covering the area)

They changed their focus this time around by homing in on Veterans currently in GPD programs who were nearly ready to exit to permanent housing but could benefit from some extra TLC to get them moving on.

Usually, these Veterans would eventually move into permanent housing on their own, and in their own time. But “business as usual” also meant that any hiccups or barriers that these Veterans encountered would have to be addressed individually.

Could a surge format, where a group of dedicated One Team partners was laser-focused on supporting a cohort of Veterans in exiting to permanent housing, do it better?

That answer was yes!

What a difference a week makes

From July 25, 2026, to July 31, 2026, the Indiana One Team was able to move 16 homeless Veterans into permanent housing. An additional 4 Veterans moved to permanent housing the following week—because some landlords preferred to start the lease on the first of the month—for a total of 20 Veterans permanently housed during the surge.

This is five times more Veterans housed in a week than with “business as usual!”

The benefits of this approach are clear:

• For Veterans, it streamlined their permanent housing experience while making them feel like part of something special alongside other Veterans moving out.
• For the staff, the surge was another event that boosted morale while further enhancing coordination, making future events even easier!

Convinced of the benefits, the Indianapolis One Team plans to do these surges every three months.

Practice considerations

For other communities interested in adopting this approach, the Indianapolis One Team offers some considerations:

• Use the surge toolkit as it offers concrete guidance on how to implement surges.
• Hold case conferencing and systems planning meetings before and during the surge to both troubleshoot Veteran barriers while also managing enrollments and process flows to the various One Team partner programs.
• Make a plan for how to make use of the newly available GPD transitional housing beds that will open up now that many Veterans have moved out.
• Honor Veterans’ choices. There were actually two Veterans identified during the surge who were initially included in the cohort but did not feel ready to proceed.

Got questions?

If you have questions about this practice, email HomelessVets@va.gov.