VA grants totaling $1.17 billion to fight veteran homelessness begin Oct. 1
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced the awards on Sept. 14: $855 million in one-year Supportive Services for Veteran Families grants and $318 million in three-year Grant and Per Diem grants. The funding notices carry terms drawn from a 2025 executive order on grant oversight.
Washington. Grants totaling $1.17 billion that the Department of Veterans Affairs announced on Sept. 14 begin on Oct. 1, the first day of the 2027 fiscal year. The money goes to organizations that help veterans who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. The department called the total a record, and said the grants follow fiscal 2025, when it housed 51,936 homeless veterans, the most in seven years.
The department put the recipients at 680 organizations. Its two award lists count 680 grants, 242 under Supportive Services for Veteran Families and 438 under Grant and Per Diem, and several organizations hold more than one. United States Veterans Initiative, a Los Angeles nonprofit, appears 21 times. The lists name the recipients but not what each one receives.
Two programs
Of the total, $855 million goes to one-year Supportive Services grants. Grantees provide case management and supportive services to veterans and their families: preventing the imminent loss of a home, finding more suitable housing, and rapidly re-housing those who are homeless. Only private nonprofit organizations and consumer cooperatives could apply, and the program's funding notice expected individual awards to range from $262,981 to $23,153,846.
The other $318 million goes to three-year Grant and Per Diem grants, which run through Sept. 30, 2029. They pay for transitional housing with supportive services, for service centers, for transition-in-place housing, in which veterans stay in their unit while they move toward permanent housing, and for housing designed for women veterans and for veterans who are chronically mentally ill, frail, elderly, terminally ill or caring for minor dependents. By the Herald's count, the award list adds up to 11,305 beds. The notice for Per Diem Only grants, most of the list, was open to Section 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(19) nonprofits, state and local government agencies and federally recognized tribal governments.
Terms that come with the money
The funding notices for both programs cite Executive Order 14332, Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking, which President Trump signed on Aug. 7, 2025.
Under the order, the Supportive Services notice says, the department may remove from consideration any applicant it deems does not "demonstrably advance the President's or VA's priorities." It will not fund activities that "use racial preference for eligibility criteria or promote gender ideology," or that promote or facilitate violations of immigration laws.
The Per Diem Only notice says grantees may not draw down grant funds for specific projects without the department's affirmative authorization, and must explain each drawdown request in writing.
Applications for both rounds closed in February. Neither program has a funding notice open now, according to the department's program pages.
About this story
501c3.help wrote this story from the sources listed with it, not from material an organization sent. Our editors approved it on Sept. 29, 2026. Stories in The Nonprofit Herald are free, and nothing is asked in return. Editorial rules.
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