The Greenville Homeless Alliance will dissolve in the coming months following the retirement of Director Susan McLarty.
The nonprofit organization announced the decision and McLarty’s retirement Feb. 3 on social media. The Greenville Homeless Alliance’s steering committee voted to dissolve the organization during its board retreat on Jan. 31.
The Greenville Homeless Alliance was started in 2018 as a collective to educate the community, advocate for and find solutions to end homelessness in Greenville County. McLarty has served as the organization’s director for the past seven years. According to the announcement, McLarty has decided to retire to focus on her family and care for her aging parents.
Matt Johnson, co-chair of the GHA steering committee, said several factors contributed to the board’s decision to dissolve the nonprofit, including McLarty’s retirement and the new homelessness task force created by the United Way of Greenville County and other organizations last year.
Read more about the homelessness task force
“The good news was the Greenville Homeless Alliance wasn’t intended to be around forever,” Johnson said. “Our hope was that we could either solve the problem altogether – which seemed unlikely – or get the community awareness and initiatives up to a level where it was being done elsewhere.”
According to the announcement, the Greenville Homeless Alliance plans to integrate its programs and resources into the work of its partners and the task force to create a “more streamlined approach to addressing homelessness.” The steering committee plans to finalize and implement a transition plan over the upcoming months. Johnson said there isn’t currently a timeline for when the organization will officially shut down its operations.
“We’re still trying to figure out the best way to go about it,” Johnson said. “We want to be sensitive to making sure that certain projects that we’ve started continue.”
To read the Greenville Homeless Alliance’s full announcement, visit bit.ly/40PCcTU.
