At Cornerstone Community Outreach, our mission is to do more than provide shelter—we strive to restore dignity, agency, and a sense of belonging to every person who walks through our doors. That’s why we’re exploring a new framework to deepen our impact: the Civic Identity Hub.
Civic identity is more than paperwork or a mailing address. It’s the ability to be seen, counted, and heard in society. It’s how someone knows they belong—not just to a system, but to a community. For people experiencing homelessness, this identity is often lost or stripped away, leading to a cycle of invisibility and disconnection from public life.
The Civic Identity Hub is a vision born out of our frontline experience at Cornerstone and our commitment to innovation in care. It is a space—physical, relational, and digital—where individuals can begin to recover what has been taken from them:
-Healthcare integration (linkages to Medicaid, primary care, and behavioral health)
-Legal identification (state IDs, birth certificates, benefits enrollment)
-Access to civic life (voter registration, census participation, mail services)
-Restored agency (support to reclaim voice, purpose, and social participation)
While our Medically Integrated Shelter model addresses physical and mental health, the Civic Identity Hub expands that care to include social and civic health—the foundational structures of belonging and participation.
This is not a new building; it’s a new way of seeing people. A way of helping each person become known again—to themselves, their community, and the systems that shape their lives.
As we develop this vision, we invite civic leaders, policymakers, and neighbors to imagine with us:
What would it look like if housing, healthcare, and civic identity were restored in the same space?
What kind of city might we become?
Let’s build it—together.