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The Way Home is made up of more than 100 partners from all areas of the community, including homeless service agencies, local governments, public housing authorities, the local Veterans Affairs office, and other nonprofits and community stakeholders. The partners of The Way Home work to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring in our region. As lead agency to The Way Home, the Coalition hosts regular forums for CoC member agencies, HMIS participating agencies, and people with lived experience to share information and receive recommendations and input for the CoC Steering Committee. HMIS allows the aggregation of client-level data across homeless service agencies to generate unduplicated counts and service patterns of clients accessing services. The Department of Housing & Urban Development’s National Data and Technical Standards establish baseline standards for participation, data collection, privacy, and security. Implementation of HMIS is a requirement for receipt of HUD McKinney-Vento funding.
The Way Home Steering Committee is seeking At-Large Steering Committee Representatives. Among other duties, At-Large committee members should be able to help identify and leverage non-housing funds and expertise in the systems in which they work to help advance the region-wide effort to make homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. Eichenbaum describes the many steps it takes to secure housing and other services for any one person or family.
Women Experiencing Homelessness: an Invisible Reality
Applications must demonstrate broad community participation and identify resources and gaps in the community’s approach to providing permanent housing and other critical services that address homelessness. The Homeless Management Information System is a computerized data collection tool specifically designed to capture client-level, system-wide information over time on the characteristics and services needs of people experiencing homelessness. The Homeless Management Information System is a computerized data collection tool specifically designed to capture client-level, system-wide information over time on the characteristics and services needs of men, women, and children experiencing homelessness. Currently, more than 100 partners are collaborating through The Way Home to implement programs that are all based on a Housing First model.
While some were figuring out housing, others were addressing the emergency needs for social services, medicine, food, and clothing. This group, seeing the need beyond emergency relief, began calling themselves The Way Home. Traveling through America's cities, the photographers for The Way Home have recorded homelessness not as a general social condition or charged political issue, but as a personal predicament with which real men and women grapple. From Miami to Seattle, Houston to Chicago, New York to Los Angeles, these artists document homelessness and its solutions with compassionate and incisive eyes.
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“We wanted to right-size all of the different services that were available to meet the specific needs of our community,” Eichenbaum said. Through this collaborative effort, we’ve helped connect 2,201 homeless veterans to housing. Since 2000, Alvarez has played a key role in developing and implementing effective methodological practices in the arena of permanent supportive housing and “Housing First” in both single site and scattered site settings.
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.
The Way Home Forums
Organizers said volunteers prepare and deliver meals to the public refrigerators three to four times a week. "The food they put in here be good food. It's not garbage. It's some nice stuff in there," said Delk. "It's a wonderful thing to have people doing stuff like that for us. There's a lot of people sleeping out on the streets out here." She bought food out of her own pocket and cooked the hot meals for the program.
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.
Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County, a 501c3, is the lead agency to The Way Home. Karen will review the report for errors, and, if any are identified, you will receive back the Data Quality Report so that the errors can be addressed and corrected by the 15th of the month. Each HMIS user must complete annual security training provided by HMIS Staff. Failure to complete this training will result in user account suspension until the training has been completed.
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.
The Way Home is a short-form documentary series that examines the homelessness crisis in California — the state with largest homeless population in the US. For Patel, serving the community is nourishing,"Just know that people are in need of food especially now with inflation as well." Community Kitchens, a nonprofit, said a portion of a $400,000 grant from Kaiser Permanente funds the training of the home chefs and supplies the packaging for the meals. "This just felt more personable, using our own ingredients, our own resources and pick the meals we want to provide," she said.
Federal funds are also provided through Emergency Solutions Grant and Community Development Block Grant funds. The Coalition also works to source other federal, state, local, and private dollars to meet the needs of people and families experiencing homelessness. The Chair has the authority to open and close the public speaking portion of each action item on the agenda to ensure the meeting continues to move along at a reasonable pace. Blessington Street is part of the 13 Houses Campaign, a service opened in 2015 as a Cold Weather Initiative to give a humanitarian response to homelessness during the coldest months of the year. In addition, evening meals, breakfast and access to shower facilities are provided all year round.
How does the city establish that coordination between local jurisdictions and the larger community? Local leadership must understand the need for coordination and understand that no local entity can do it alone, he said. The All the Way Home campaign is a broad partnership between public, private, non-profit and faith organizations working together to eliminate veteran homelessness in Santa Clara County. The updated Community Plan includes nine goals and forty strategies that build upon successful efforts to significantly reduce chronic homelessness, effectively end homelessness among Veterans and make major inroads in reducing family and youth homelessness. Attendance in The Way Home Steering Committee meetings is now being required for CoC funded agencies and those wishing to compete in CoC funding competitions. CoC NOFO funded agencies are required to attend at-least 75% of CoC Steering Committee meetings.
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.
HMIS Forum
When people come to Depaul they are linked with a designated keyworker who will work through plan to support their move to independent living where possible. Giving the perspective of one service provider within Houston’s coordinated approach, Costis says that at the end of the day, SEARCH has become larger and is serving more people with more resources while getting better outcomes and having stronger partnerships. The system allows, encourages and supports providers to bring and expand on their “greatest competencies,” Costis said. All told, a single person being housed might be touched by 10 different agencies using five different grants, Eichenbaum said.
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