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We are a crossover group, housed-unhoused, that is on the ground gathering information, building relationships, and working to end the ugliness of life on the street. The Way Home Campaign brings together 110 organizations and over 7,000 voters to end chronic homelessness in D.C. We advocate for budgets and policies that put our unhoused neighbors first. As a result, Santa Clara County has among the highest rate of unsheltered homeless veterans in the country.
Taking the time to understand the work and successes of other communities inspires me to redouble my efforts as well. On the Way Home” (I was the first guest of the podcast’s predecessor “Out Of The Blue”) is a wonderfully informative podcast on homelessness and the issues surrounding it. Great care is taken when speaking with those with lived and living homelessness experience, as well as world experts. Rarely does one come across a podcast with such depth and production value. And often, a strategy to address homelessness that one mayoral administration champions is not necessarily prioritized by the next.
From the Famvin Homeless Alliance.
Celina Alvarez is the executive director of Housing Works, an organization that provides street and shelter outreach to individuals and families living on the streets and in shelters. She began working in non-profit in the HIV field in 1993 during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. Click here to sign up for the monthly “The Way Home CoC Connection” e-newsletter to receive information on what’s happening in the Houston region’s homeless response system. If a specific resolution number is not cited, comments will be saved for the Open Public Comment portion of the meeting.
Without The Way Home, it might be impossible for both the client experiencing homelessness to navigate the system and for homeless agencies to navigate the funding, he said. More than 20 different homelessness grants are available from different agencies, different sectors of the government and the private sector, said Eichenbaum. Each comes with its own requirements, eligibility rules and timelines, and bringing all those funding sources together to create an effective system can be overwhelming to a lot of cities and counties, he said. Many veterans experience conditions that place them at increased risk for homelessness, including higher rates of mental health issues, addiction disorder and lost jobs. Veterans experiencing homelessness are more likely to live on the street than in shelters and often remain on the street for extended periods of time.
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For example, some service providers had to drop programs that they had offered for decades because they were being duplicated within the new system. Through The Way Home, the city, surrounding counties and service providers and agencies operating in the region work together to quickly place those living on the street into housing and provide them with the services they need to thrive and remain housed long term. In 2011 a group of concerned social service representatives, county officials, nonprofit representatives, and religious leaders met to address the need to relocate and house people from a Lower Bucks County homeless encampment that was being cleared out by local authorities.
As we look to the future and usher in 2021, it is with the hope that this documentary series' message will remain at the forefront of our minds and hearts. But by working together, we can end veteran homelessness in Santa Clara County. Partnerships to quickly match veterans in-need with newly-available housing units. As COVID patients have flooded into LAC+USC in recent weeks, they’ve put an immense strain on its ICU capacity and staff — especially since non-COVID patients, with gunshot wounds, drug overdoses, heart attacks and strokes, also need intensive care.
The benefits of coordination
Often, elected local leaders want to focus on other issues, thus that focus on addressing homelessness is no longer there, Eichenbaum said. It’s also important for communities to use a common approach and understanding of priorities and needs, with deep communication between teams that may be seeing the same person for different services, she said. “This type of coordination allows for real-time problem-solving when challenges arise,” Oliva said. Before The Way Home, there were voids in Houston’s homelessness system, and other efforts were being duplicated, said Eichenbaum.
These figures only consider the numbers of adults accessing emergency accommodation during a specific count week, typically the last full week of the month. The numbers do not include the many women and children living in domestic violence refuges or residing in direct provision centres and the issue is therefore underestimated. Politics and local buy-in are major hurdles for many cities that have talked with Houston about developing their own coordinated care system, said Eichenbaum.
Different providers and agencies have different experiences, services and values that they contribute to the system, said Thao Costis, president and CEO of SEARCH Homeless Services, a Houston-based agency that is a member of The Way Home. They each have different needs and approaches to how they want things done, different clients they would like served, and each has its own individual goals it needs to meet. The “old way” the community delivered homelessness programs had not been working, so a willingness among leaders “to do something different” was necessary, said Martinez. But implementing the “significant” changes to the homeless system in Greater Houston has “not always been easy,” she said.
A must-listen for those interested in the work currently being done to end homelessness in our country. The report also shows that more than half of families living in emergency accommodation are single parents and its increase, according to Focus Ireland, is primarily due to the loss of private rented accommodation. Individuals and families also need to navigate multiple program requirements or intake processes to access resources while working with multiple caseworkers who do not talk to each other to coordinate care or referrals.
With The Way Home’s coordination, those performing duplicate work were asked to shift their efforts to fill some of the identified service gaps, he said. The purpose of the HMIS forum is to inform the HMIS community about recent data trends, ongoing system-wide activities, and important developments regarding HMIS and our software ClientTrack. The Way Home is the collaborative model to prevent and end homelessness in Houston, and throughout Harris, Fort Bend, and Montgomery County, Texas. Its goals are to understand the size and scope of the problem of homelessness in our community, and to design effective strategies and solutions to address the problem. Membership in the CoC ensures community wide commitment to preventing and ending homelessness and must represent a diverse body of stakeholders throughout the entire geographic area of the CoC. The intent is that the CoC be as inclusive as possible, to include the opinions and insights of various parties.
This unique collaboration is led by the City of San Jose, County of Santa Clara, Santa Clara County Housing Authority, in partnership with a consortium of local non-profit service providers. Federal and local veteran housing programs, which provide rental subsidies and case managers to help homeless veterans secure housing. Strategy oversight meetings will occur a few times a year and take a deeper dive into the data and work done at the client and programmatic level. Business meetings occur throughout the year and focus on administrative tasks, funding updates, implementation updates, and system resolutions.
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