So, the discussion about who will do street outreach services for homeless people is my example here, but you can apply it to the day center service providers, the Housing Help Desk (county housing services) and the coordinated intake system (for homeless services) too. What would you prefer? Great services, right? What win’s RFP’s (Requests for Proposals) or grant funding battles? The perception of how strong your administrative skills are or the perception of the strength of your organization. i.e. the larger organizations.
Large organizations say they can provide the services and funders believe them. But there is no check on the quality of those services. Small organizations will get the admin work done one way or the other or they won’t get paid, but the perception of that prevents them from getting grants. So small organizations, particularly those who employ people of color (not the case in my examples here) are doubly disadvantaged. Here’s our latest example of choosing a “strong organization” vs strong services.
This is from the CDBG commission meeting last night. The issue is funding $100,000 for street outreach services for chronically mental ill persons. In this case, particularly to help pre-screen them and “get them ready for” the Rethke project. (As a side note, if you have to “get people ready for” housing, that is NOT Housing First. In this case, the people entering Rethke will have to be on Medicare/Medicaid or be in the county’s new CCS program so Heartland Housing can charge for their services.)
Jim O’Keefe, Director of Community Development for the City of Madison explains the background. He says the division requested $100,000 in the budget for a street outreach team. (There was an amendment to cut this from the budget at Board of Estimates by Alders Cheeks, Eskrich and Bidar-Sielaff, but it failed) This was in anticipation of 100 units of affordable housing units coming on line. The single biggest barrier to our Housing First initiative is finding housing units. So, in anticipation of those units they watned to engage their intended residents to connect with them and build relationships and that takes time to make those connections and build trust and relationships and begin the process to move people into housing. 60 of the units will be at Rethke and they are scheduled to be available end of April of beginning of May and this was to help people move into the units quicker. The work is not confined to the Rethke units, but that is a major portion of the units and that will be the focus initially. They issued and RFP, and frankly they expected they would get one proposal from Heartland, but they got two additional proposals also, two quality proposals. They had a staff team, Sue Wallinger, Sue Morrison, himself and Matt Wachter who review the proposals. They evaluated the proposals against the scoring criteria and met as a committee and it was a closer competition than they expected but in the end by consensus they recommended the Heartland Health Outreach group. There were a couple of factors that went into that decision, paramount was their familiarity with the developer and management group, Heartland Housing, they are very familiar with that group and how they work and presented the best chance to provide a seamless transition from homelessness to housing. He suggests that the appropriate action would be to move a substitute motion to identify the provider in the resolution if they agree with the staff recommendation.
Dan O’Callaghan, the chair of the committee says that in their packets they have a copy of the RFP that went out mid-January and was due at the end of January and then copies of the three proposals they got back. Heartland was recommended and the other two are included as well.
Connor Wild, who currently works at Bethel running the de facto day center (one large room with a computer lab and a clothing closet in part of a church basement) Monday – Friday which will close in April, applied with a new group Stepping Stones with Madison Urban Ministry as their fiscal agent. (The other group to apply was Tellurian) He hands out the proposal with some additional information about their statistics of who they serve and 5 stories. With all due respect he would like to challenge that recommendation, they are a phenomenal provider for the Rethke project, however we keep hearing this idea of building relationships and that is their mission, that is what they have been doing since 2009. He has been working with chronically homeless for 7 years since he moved here. They have great relationships with people in the community, if you are worried about seamless transitions this is as about as seamless as it gets. He can guarantee you that if you bring in new street outreach workers you will be spending $100,000 on 6 – 12 months of building relationships and experience that they are bringing to the table, working with this population. He says he knows that one of the big hiccups is that they don’t have a licensed social worker on staff, but he has 7 years experience working with the population that is the target of the proposal. Working with chronically homeless is not about having the right degree, its about having the right personality and approach and knowing the subcultures on the street, the street culture out there and knowing the community and knowing the people on the street and that can only come from experience, you can’t learn that at college. They have been doing VI-SPDATs with people (surveys and evaluations of people’s vulnerabilities on the street), they did trainings on service point, they have been working with Housing First programs like Tellurian, the Road Home and Housing Initiatives. They call us when they are looking for people to get connected with, they help with the paperwork, and they have close relationships. He knows there has been some confusion about the program due to the reactive Church Council, so Stepping Stones is them branching off from Bethel Homeless Support Services, MUM has been kind enough to extend their 501(c)(3) status to us in the interim. Skyler and him would be the street outreach workers who are the staff at Bethel Support Services, but due to circumstances at the church they are forced to move their programming. But this is a seamless transition, their 5 day a week programming will be ending at the Churches request. You have two people who are well versed in the community, know people by name, have the relationships and are ready to start a new path, this seems like a logical next step, its not too hard to imagine us working closely with Heartland in terms of what they need to place people since they already work with Housing First programs.
Dan O’Calloghan asks about the transition from Bethel to MUM, where do you see Stepping Stones 5 years from now?
Wild says they have a unique approach that they honed in at Bethel and he’d like to see that prosper and use the approach and philosophy used wherever it is needed. They say that when they expanded their services to 5 days a week for the county, they filled a needed niche. This is a new niche that is opening up and they have the skills and experience required by it and they see themselves filling that niche and doing what they do best. As far as where he sees them, they have been trying to establish a street outreach component for their program since he started so it is a very natural outgrowth of what he saw his program doing anyways. They want to continue their model in the next few years.
O’Callaghan says that it sounds like he and Skyler, do you feel like you have support, community partners, people supporting you in the work.
Wild says “absolutely” we can’t do our jobs wtihout the collaborations they have. They have regular communications because they serve as a triage function at Bethel and they are always reaching out to service providers and they work closely with the outreach workers and the hospitals. They are the first stop for service providers reaching out to the homeless community. They ask if we know this person. And we get them connected, they have alot of connections, support and respect.
Ricky Hunt asks about their administrative function, are you still at Bethel, are you transitioning as far as office space?
Wild says that they have been offered office space at Madison Urban Ministry. He has also requested the church council to keep an office there, but they are slow in responding to him. They want a downtown location, it would make more sense. They will consider that at their next meeting, but right now they have office space at Madison Urban Ministry.
O’Callaghan asks if they weren’t selected, do you see a role in the work Heartland is doing, is there an opportunity for partnership there at all?
Wild asks if that is as separate organizations. Wild says he doesn’t, their program is ending at Bethel and they are in transition, if things don’t fall into place, they won’t have any place to turn to. They would have to look elsewhere.
Remember Sarah and Z!, who the whole community fell in love with . . . where are they now? Gone, off doing other good things. After being screwed around by the system for so long, they (rightfully) gave up and moved on. They have to make a living and they can’t wait years without a job while the city and county figure out how to create a day center! And now . . . Connor and Skyler . . . the same fate. Great people, doing great work, in small organizations that are not the favored groups . . . tossed to the wind. Meanwhile we give money to agencies that don’t develop this same kind of talent and expertise. (Not necessarily talking about Heartland here, as they are new to the community and many people are hopeful that they will bring change to the current order of things) What are we thinking as a community. Confined to our scoring sheets and perceptions, making decisions based on a the old way of doing things in a system that is clearly broken. Repeating our mistakes of the past because it is comfortable. Ignoring the very real resources that we have right in front of our faces! And most of the weaknesses of SHINE and Stepping Stones are created by the very people who underfund them!
Alder Maurice Cheeks asks if they don’t see a transition? (sorry, it was hard to hear)
Wild says that if they have a purpose to be in existence, they will be here. O’Callaghan says it sounds like you have a purpose, you need resources. Wild says yes. Cheeks says your purpose isn’t defined by someone giving you money, your purpose is defined by the purpose, right. Connor says right. Cheeks says, or maybe its not, thank you.
I feel like there is this crazy expectation that if you have a passion for doing something, you need to do it for free! It’s like people think that they will give money to one organization and then the other people in the community will run around and clean up the mess that is left, for free. Why are these people doing this incredibly difficult work looked at as if they are asking for something unreasonable. To be paid for their work. We’re back to the thinking that people doing the hardest work in our community are parasites instead of partners. Why is this commission not trying to find a way to save these valuable services, preserve the relationships and systems that are working? Why are the instead looking at this guy like he just wants to save his job. (Yes, that was muttered by people after the meeting.) The reality here is that to live in Madison, you need income. What would be so wrong about making sure that 7 years of experience doesn’t move to New York. Or go into the IT field. We have a valuable resource, that would yield a high ROI (return on investment) – if you want it in terms the business community would understand. But instead, they’re treated like they are doing something wrong somehow. How can it be wrong to offer your valuable skills to a community that desperately needs them, and how do you do it without being treated like a parasite trying to suck money out of “the system”. We’ve got it all backwards as a community. And it costs us more in the long run.
Alder Matt Phair asks who was on the committe that scored the proposals and are there scores or a ranking? Did they get that information?
O’Keefe says there are scores and they did not get them. He isn’t sure what that they normally do.
Phair understands that, he just wants an overview.
O’Keefe says the reviewers were Sue Wallinger, Sue Morrison, himself and Matt Wachter. They scored the proposals based on the criteria in the RFP. He doesn’t dispute anything Connor has said in terms of the description of the work he and his work have done. He says there were two points that worked against them, the uncertainty of that organization. The timing wasn’t the best timed opportunity for them. Second there was an explicit requirement that they have at least one licensed social worker with at least 2 years of experience and as Connor mentioned that wasn’t part of their request. Frankly, the closer call was between the other applicant (they had a licensed social worker working 4 hours a week in one of the proposals) Tellurian, it was a choice between an organization that has a lot of the local connections like Connor and his team but not quite the depth of experience and depth of work in Housing First. The other group has a richer and deeper experience in the model, but not the relationships. They are going to have to be new relationships formed, whether it is folks int he community with these new housing providers or by somebody that is connected to that housing provider and the support service agencies in place. Those are the things they struggled with between the Tellurian and Heartland proposal and again, the Stepping Stones proposal was really compromised by its failure to address the one explicit requirement of the RFP and the tenuous nature of that organization, and its viability. He is happy to give the scores, on a scale of 100 points. Again, burdened by the one deficiency, this will sound worse that it is, because in many respects the Stepping Stones was a good proposal, but on average it scored 41.25. Tellurian was 88.88 and Heartland was 91.25. That was the starting point and then they discussed, because they don’t base decisions only on the scores, there is subjectivity in the scores, its a good starting point and it underscored the closeness of the two applications and that one was deficient in an important area. He could distribute it if you like.
Phair says he doesn’t need it, he just wanted to know the answer.
Review panels. In hiring, the city has started getting people from other areas of the city departments to review applicants to ensure diversity, its part of the equity discussion. Perhaps the same approach should be done here so its not all people from the same department, who likely have a lot of the same ideas, scoring the applicants. Sometimes fresh eyes and innocent questions can make a huge difference.
RFP and requirements: Oddly enough, I don’t see a resolution authorizing this RFP in legistar, I may have missed it. Or it might be because it was in the budget its not necessary. Either way, if there was a resolution, I’m quite certain the RFP was not reviewed by the council. Who decided there needed to be a social worker on the team? Did the council say that was a requirement? Again, in hiring, that is another barrier that they are trying to remove to get more diversity and in many cases, a certain number of years of experience qualifies the same as the degree. Why wasn’t that an option here?
Tellurian: I’m sorry, but you can’t say that Tellurian has a lot of the local connections “like Connor and his team”, its not at all the same.
Relationships. Note when Jim is talking, he talks about relationships between agencies. When Connor was talking, he was talking about what I consider to be the more important relationship, the relationship to those people who are going to be served, building that trust.
Alder Samba Baldeh asks if the other applicants were notified that we were having this meeting?
O’Keefe says yes. They contacted each of the applicants and he suggested to the folks at Heartland, that work out of Chicago, that he did not think it was necessary for them to appear. He doesn’t know if there would be a lot added. Tellurian was notified as well. He gave the same advice to Heartland as well that they don’t need to attend the Board of Estimates (14th) or Council meeting (23rd).
Groan. Shouldn’t this be part of the relationship building that they do in this community? Personally, I think that was bad advice.
Baldeh says that his concern with the RFP was that in many cases, we look at people who are new to the business vs the scope of the RFP and it makes it really hard for us to make the city better. In a way, if we give opportunity to a new business and new people who are trying to develop skills to benefit as well. Heartland will be an established entity that is not from the community. From his testimony, he has a strong partnership connection with homeless people and that is what matters in services. If it is that important, if they were given the contract, could they hire someone with that experience? I think that evaluation was very poor. So, his other point is that he wants to give opportunity to people like him, who have have the real experience to do the work, but when you present something in a format like this, its always a problem to give them an opportunity for what they can do – if he is able to work with them – we should give them an opportunity to come back and give us something we can approve. He thinks to make the city a better place for every body we need to find a way to do something for the city, but if we have to go by certain experience and have all this other stuff, and we know people are struggling, it is always going to be difficult to get people like him and we get services like we always get.
I love Samba Baldeh, I have the biggest political crush on this guy ever!!! And I’m not afraid to admit it. The way he says things so plainly, stating the obvious no one else will say, is just beautiful. I want 20 Samba Baldeh’s on the Council and 37 of him on the county board. Imagine what a different world we would live in!
And I apologize if I didn’t quite get that all right, since I still struggle a bit with his awesome accent. I definitely got the important points!
O’Keefe says there is no question that Heartland will need to, and they understand, the importance of them developing good strong working relationships, with the network of service providers in the area. We have had Heartland officials in Madison and we tried to establish a few opportunities for council members to hear from them and about their philosophy and approach. It wasn’t well attended but the handful of alders that heard that cam away impressed with that philosophy and impressed with their track record. That was very, very important to us. We made a significant investment in the Rethke development and this effort is all about making that a smooth as possible. Those relationships with prospective tenants, some of the most difficult challenges to stable housing, working off the prioritized community list, the most difficult people to work with and we think it is reasonable to expect that having someone with clinical experience working with mental illness and substance abuse issues is an integral part of that team. To make those connections to develop service and treatment plans and pave the way into permanent housing. That description of Housing First is making my skin crawl, can we just not call this Housing First at this point . . . if you have to “get ready” and have service plans, I think we are missing the point. That is the thinking. The tenuousness of the Stepping Stone organization is one that would be very difficult for us, an organization in a state of transition, its future uncertain. He doesn’t dispute the work they have done, but things are about to change for that organization and to entrust them to this particular task wasn’t a particularly difficult call to make in this RFP.
Baldeh asks if there is an opportunity for Heartland to work with them?
O’Keefe says Heartland will need to form a team here and he can’t speak for them about what they will do to do that, but the opportunity is there.
Ricky Hunt asks if there can be a connection made between Stepping Stone and Heartland as far as bringing them together.
O’Keefe says that Heartland is eager to establish a presence in Madison as soon as possible, this will make that happen more quickly and they have made it clear they understand the importance of reaching out and connecting with and building strong relationship with other players in the community. He wishes they had heard them talk about their work, its a key part of what they do, working with the service providers and clients they hope to serve. To help them get into stable housing.
Hunt asks Wild if he tried to reach out to Heartland at all.
Wild says they hosted them in the initial planning process, they hosted a forum. The talked with alot of the individuals in their program and guests. They talked about the architecture and other aspects of the program, but that was the only contact with them.
They make a motion to put Heartland Health Outreach, Inc. into the resolution as their recommendation. Motion made by Phair, seconded by Ben Van Pelt.
Cheeks says that he appreciates Alder Baldeh’s point in bringing up the importance of finding ways to work with organizations that have demonstrated capacity, enthusiasm, relationships, whatever. As the city structures the way we do work, we are imposing biases and while I don’t think this process was flawed, this process was done traditionally and scored appropriately and staff has recommended something consistent with the way the RFP was drawn up. You are raising a point that as alders we need to make sure we structure processes that are sufficiently inviting and equitable, cuz RFPs, by their nature, don’t facilitate that.
Amen.
O’Calloghan says his comments were valuable and on point. It strikes him that we have an organization with a tremendous depth of experience but lacking local connections and we have another proposal by an entrepreneurial, grass-roots organization with tremendous local connections but lacking the depth of organizational capacity and history and that is a real opportunity for partnership and regardless of the outcome here he hopes the partnership will be fostered in some way, he doesn’t know that they have a direct role to play in that, but he thanks Connor for being here, for putting in an RFP and for doing the work that you do, and he hopes that he will continue doing it, one way or another.
And there you have it. Pat on the head, go do your good work without support from us in any way whatsoever. We’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong, not help you fix it, and toss you out with the bathwater because you don’t fit in our neat little boxes – even when it has nothing to do with the quality of the services being provided. The number on concern is NOT quality of services. That seems to be just about the last consideration in this entire discussion. How will the chronically homeless people on the street be impacted by this. That’s THE definition of all this equity talk. But once again, wait, not this time. Just wait. And while we wait, we lose another great provider in the community, like we did with Sarah and Z! and Shine608. And we “hope” that it will work out.
Colin Bowden asks if the the people hired will work with the CDBG staff person, is that related to Zero 2016? Do they work with coordinated intake?
O’Keefe says yes to both, they will be working with Laura (Wichert), and others who seek to connect people with housing. Things have changed a little bit in the sense that we have moved away from the nameless faceless group of homeless people. We have have made an effort to identify, evaluate and prioritize people, real people and the list that has been generated and that is the working document that Laura will be trying to help service providers and property owners and people with housing, to connect with the people at the top of the list. The reason this proposal is here, is because the other thing that is going to change is that in the course of the next few months we will move from a situation where it is extraordinarily difficult to find an open apartment and a landlord willing to make a unit available, there is going to be a surge of available units, ti won’t satisfy the entire need, but that surge is from a project inspired by the city and financed in part by the city – the Rethke Apartments and we want that to work as smoothly as possible and so rather than wait until those units are available, we want to get a head start and make those connections. It will mean connecting people because just because someone’s name is on the list, it won’t be easy to locate them and get them prepared to enter that housing (groan, especially since we kicked everyone out from in front of the CCB and MMB, the day center is closing down, people will have run out of days in shelter for the year . . . and we’re not hiring the people who have the direct relationships to do the work . . . its like we are shooting ourselves in the foot. We are shooting ourselves in the foot, and expecting ourselves to try to run a marathon. Sometimes we are just absurd.) There is work that needs to be done, there is trust building and relationship building that need to happen and this is about trying to get ahead of the curve and be prepared so when they units are avialable there is less of a delay in putting people in there. This is a one year contract and we will see what happens and how it goes. We will take a year to determine if this is a good way to spend this kind of money and all of that lies ahead of us.
Phair says that he questioned this at BOE when this came forward, he trusts our staff, but he is not sure this is the right way to go, he wasn’t sure form the beginning. And he was stacking this proposal against all kinds of other wants and needs in the city, so that was part of the perspective. He thinks he said then that he thought with existing resources we have we could reach out to them and help the Rethke project without this, but it also makes sense and he really really hopes it will work and he trusts staff, but getting back to what Alder Baldeh was saying, he wonders if this was needed, but at the same time, he doesn’t know the right way to do this. He hopes this is the right way to go, we’ll see in a year. Some part of me feels like we have a whole ton of resou . . . we can always use more resources, and the organizations can always use more dollar resources, but we have a web of folks out there already working and if we could organize them around this outreach program I thought that maybe that would be the better way to go, so maybe we’ll see, maybe Heartland will come in and do some of that and we will have that web . . . you know what I mean, I just wanted to get that off my chest. I will support this.
See above rants . . . the magical web (of mostly free) services will take care of it.
Cheeks asks when Rethke will open.
O’Keefe says end of April, beginning of May, he hasn’t been out there in a while, but they are hard at it.
Motion passes unanimously.
A COMPLETE sidenote: Notice anything about this committee? It’s a complete sausage festival, all men! And who is doing the work in the agencies . . . 80 – 90% women. In their defense, they have 4 african american men on the committee, but that is how we do it, people of color are put on committees like Affirmative Action and the Equal Opportunities Commission, I digress . . . but why are the men controlling the money and the women doing the work at the low wages? Equity – a meaningless word thrown around when convenient to justify a bad decision. But not for real life.
