A national nonprofit has partnered with several Georgia organizations to combat veteran homelessness by offering dozens of tiny homes to Georgia’s homeless veterans.
The agency, Nine Line Foundation, recently announced a partnership with the Golden Isles Veterans’ Village Initiative, SSG Dustin M. Wright Foundation and several Georgia Rotary clubs to build a Veterans Village in Brunswick, Georgia. The veteran organization, which supports wounded and at-risk veterans, seeks to build an entire village of about 40 tiny homes at G Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
“Nine Line Foundation already has the interior and exterior walls and roofing components built for twenty tiny homes, ready to be relocated to the Brunswick site as soon as the sitework is completed,” according to a statement on the nonprofit’s website. “Nine Line Foundation is also working with three schools in Illinois and anticipates that twenty more tiny home wall and roofing components will be built this spring and transported down to Georgia.”
So far, 20 homes already have interior, exterior and roofing components built out, according to Nine Line. The 8-by-16-foot abodes will sit among a veterans community equipped with a community center, Crepe Myrtle trees and boxwood shrubbery.
The housing is intended to be temporary, Nine Line said in its statement. To help support the transitional phase, the veterans will learn skills at the village’s Aquaponics Training Center to provide them marketable business skills. The center will be a place “where the veterans will not only learn the art and science of aquaponics, but become self-sufficient and self-sustaining.”
“The goal is that, upon completion of the aquaponics training program, they will be ready to move on to a better life and permanent housing of their choosing,” according to Nine Line officials.
About 712 Georgia veterans are homeless, according to Atlanta's Housing Assistance Council. Nearly 8% of the state's 662, 333 veterans are living below the poverty level. The combination of job training, education and sustainable housing could have an impact on the current economic challenges hundreds of veterans are facing in Georgia.
“By addressing the needs of the veterans, this transitional housing program will give these veterans the hand up they deserve, to help them transition from the battlefield out of homelessness and on to a brighter future,” Nine Line said in a statement.
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