Zero what? Zero homeless who are veterans by the end of 2015 and zero persons meeting HUDs definition of chronically homeless by the end of 2016! Members of the Steering Committee are here to present to the council, question is, will the Council show up?
So far, Denise DeMarb, Mo Cheeks, Paul Skidmore, Samba Baldeh, David Ahrens, Shari Carter, Mark Clear, Ledell Zellers, Shiva Bidar, Zach Wood . . . and more will likely trickle in . . . .
Linette Rhodes from the City of Madison and Kristina Dux did the presentation. They are both on the steering committee for Zero 2016. They say this work is data driven. The show the graphs with the numbers of homeless in our Point in Time count (twice a year). Our numbers for veteran and chronic homelessness have stayed steady over the years. Rhodes says that we signed up to get technical assistance through this campiagn, there are 71 other communities that have signed up for this, they are all in different stages. Some have ended homelessness for veterans and chronic homelessness, others are just starting like us. But we can get best practices from others doing this. Our “take down” numbers are to house 130 veterans by the end of the year and 135 chronically homeless by 2016. We are also aware of families that are out there and we hope to work on that in 2017.
Kristina Dux talks about the groups that are working on this. Nonprofits, grassroots groups and others are working on it. CAC is working on a landlord engagement in February or March. The National League of Cities is going to help with that. They are also talking to elected officials. She says the goal is for homeless to be rare, brief and not re-occur. We are working on a system where we can put people into housing right away. We are working through a coordinated entry system that is a centralized resource – it prioritizes people for HUD funded units, those who are most in need are supposed to be on top of the list, its not based on who you know. We also need to provide wrap around services for people. We are also working on data driven decisions. THe data is kept in the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). There is a steering committee, we meet monthly, for a while now. We are working on these goals. We have a community wide assessment tool called the VI-SPDAT, she doesn’t remember what it stands for, but its a vulnerability index. Agencies conduct the assessment and the participant gets a score, that determines what kind of housing they should get. A higher score might be for Permanent Supportive Housing (with wrap around services), lower scores might get Rapid Rehousing, with a year of services. There is a prioritization list, they can get them through coordinated assessment.
Rhodes talks about partnerships with the Veteran’s Administration (VA). They have additional resources to help house veterans. There is also a housing placement group that meets weekly and determines where open beds are and how to get those highest on the list into those beds. We are also working on educating people about Housing First. People work on services and harm reduction with people once they are in housing. They show graphs of our goals and who we have placed. (hopefully I’ll get the powerpoint to show you). It got off to a slow start with veterans, but there was a turn around with the large number of voucher that people were shopping with. She also shows the graphs for chronically homeless. We will be looking at our numbers again. Do we really think we will reach this goal through 2016. No, but we will continue to try, we will have to push the numbers out a bit based on preliminary data.
Dux talks about how the community can help. Mostly helping find available units, get landlords to dedicate 1 or 2 or 10% of their units to the initiative. We also need to make sure we have the support services to success in this effort.
Rhodes says that in cities where they reached zero, leaders really stepped up and made this a priority. We need elected officials, agencies, boards and others to work on this. The City just agree to hire a Zero 2016 coordinator to help manage all the tasks we need to do. We need people to activate their networks, please help us by talking to people about it.
By the time they got to questions they were joined by just about everyone.
Sara Exkrich asks about needs, is it housing units or services? Rhodes says it is a mix of both. The city is prioritizing creating units, but its not just about new units, we need more units. HUD VASH vouchers come with case management. There is a lack of information about the services that come with people, but the units are the priority.
David Ahrens asks about the 800 people that were homeless in the last week in January, were they on the street. 716 were in shelter, 92 were on the street that night. We count both the night of the count.
Ahrens asks what it means to be chronically homeless? 1 year of homelessness or 4 times in 3 years AND has a documented disability. Does that mean SSI? It could, but not necessarily, but they have a diagnosis and it has to be signed off on by a doctor. Part of getting people into housing is to stabilize people so they can apply for SSDI. Ahrens says that its lack of housing and documented disability, do you help document that? Yes, an outreach worker can help them apply, but when they are on the street that is difficult. Ahrens says that documenting a disability is difficult. Dux says that the outreach worker helps them get it documented.
Mo Cheeks says this work seems to be based on data the best we understand it. How confident are you in the data and what are the limitations. Rhodes says she organizes the point-in-tine. She says they engage with as many people as they can, to make sure we can count as many people as possible. We do the point in time and do an annual count. The night of the point in time we send groups of volunteers out to find people sleeping on the streets or in uninhabitable places. There is always room for improvement. We do this twice a year, once in January and July, we try to gauge how many people we see twice a year. Cheeks says point in time data is used, are there other ways to get at the numbers. Rhodes says she has been to two trainings on data and that is why we use point in time and the annual data. When we say our goal is 135, that wasn’t because there were 135 people, at our point in time we had 67 vets and we look at how many were homeless over a year and then look at how many people we expect to come into the system over the year. We also mapped our system to see where people go when they leave shelter. Are people getting into tranistional housing, finding their own housing, etc. That helped us to make some of our decisions.
Dux says that people in transitional housing are counted as homeless and we looked at those programs to see if they should become permanent housing.
Ledell Zellers asks what we collect in the point in time survey? Rhodes says “alot”, we ask about mental illness, HIV AIDS, domestic violence, age, substance use, all those demographics. Are people cooperative. Rhodes says the teams have a lead outreach worker who is familiar with the people, and they interact well with the worker and their volunteers. We also tell people about this in advance. The first question is about if they want to answer the questions and if they say no we count them without the demographics.
Sambah Baldeh asks about families. She says there were none on the streets. She read off a bunch of numbers I couldn’t catch long enough. Baldeh asks how we plan for this. Rhodes says we are starting now, we talk about known locations with police, schools, etc. We have a map of the city, we tell people to go out there and look at the known locations and search for other areas. In the downtown area we go street by street. Baldeh asks if we ask (if this is a lifestyle?) She says no.
Shari Carter asks if there is a cut off for the family shelter for teenage boys. In Michigan they send 14 year old boys to the mens shelter. Dux says we don’t do this here.
Matt Phair asks if this counts doubled up families. The schools count 1000 kids. Rhodes says that we use HUDs definition of literally homeless, people sleeping in places that are not fit for habitation. She says she met with the schools to do the VISPDAT.
They stopped, abruptly and unceremoniously, so they could get ready for the council meeting.
