We recently unveiled our new
website, atwww.mdhadallas.org.
Please check it out, when you have a moment. It’s pretty cool, if we may say
so, ourselves!
Courtesy of Kelly Kamowski,
Unpakt
With the new website now
fully operational, we will be moving our blog to the site. We’ll keep our old
posts here, but from now on, to read our new posts, please go to: http://www.mdhadallas.org/blog/.
We hope you will continue to
follow our blog. See you at thenew site!
III.Improve Access and Coordination of
Services and Emergency Housing
IV.Rapidly House Family Households
with Children
V.Rapidly House Youth
VI.Drive Decision-making with HMIS
Data
VII.Address Racial Disparities in
Homelessness and Service Delivery
Objectives
I.Reduce the number of persons
experiencing homelessness by 5%
II.Reduce the length of stay in
homelessness by 10%
III.Reduce the number of chronic,
veteran and elderly homeless by 50%
IV.Increase the number of unsheltered
persons prioritized for housing to 500
V.Increase incomes for 20% of
zero-income households on housing priority list
VI.Increase occupancy rates for all
available shelter and housing beds to no less than 98.6%
VII.Increase housing stability in
homeless housing programs to 96%
VIII.Increase HMIS participation rates
to no less than 86% of all beds and housing types
Action
We reportquarterly on our progress[ii],
as a Continuum of Care, on 60 individual action items under the above seven
goals. Here are just a few highlights of action we are taking to make
homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring:
·Homeless Count – In January 2018, MDHA conducted
the most extensive and technologically
advanced Homeless
Countin Texas history[iii],
mobilizing more than 1,500 volunteers, and using the Counting Us app, from
Simtech Solutions. Use of the app was helpful in making the Count easier and more
accurate. By capturing the latitude and longitude of each encounter, it enabled
MDHA to send out outreach teams the very next morning to aid individuals
belonging to specific populations. MDHA provided the results of the Count at
its annualState
of the Homeless Addresson March 21, 2018.
·Homeless Response
System Leadership Training and Strategic Planning Retreat – On March 28-29, 2018, we brought
together all of the major “players”, in Dallas and Collin Counties, who can
affect systems change, for a groundbreaking gathering, facilitated by OrgCode,
led by pioneering world expert, Dr. Iain
De Jong. With De Jong and former HUD Deputy Assistant Secretary, Ann Oliva, leading a team of
facilitators, this retreat, with more than 65 senior leaders in attendance, was
designed to usher in a more strategic community response to homelessness.
Participating leaders spent two whole days of intense action-oriented
participative and interactive hard work. They focused on the critical nature ofcollective impact, and how an
effective system of care can bring about an end to homelessness in our
community. Together, through a strategic planning journey, utilizing the Breakthrough Thinkingapproach,
participants made the necessary decisions and vital commitments that will chart
our course, as a community.
Ann Oliva
Former Deputy Assistant
Secretary, HUD
·Homeless Helpline – A key part of any homeless
response system, it refers clients to several hubs: youth, domestic violence victims,
families with children, single adults, CollinCounty
residents, and general assistance, with each hub managed by a key CoC service
provider. Lessons learned through the current soft-launch period of the
helpline (which began in December 2017) will be incorporated into the public
launch.
·Housing “Challenges” - We challenge ourselves and our
partners to house a specific group of people, during a specific time period. We
have already concluded our first Top 50
Challenge; the idea is to house as many of the top 50 persons on the
Housing Priority List, as possible. This challenge proved extremely successful,
with over 80% of persons ending or on the verge of ending their homelessness!
We will now run this challenge every other month, using the off months to learn
and improve. We will soon run a Veterans
Challenge, focusing on the 67 unsheltered veterans found in the Homeless
Count. In the Spring, in collaboration with Dallas shelters, we will run an intensive Emergency Shelter Housing Challenge[iv].
·Youth Homelessness – The MDHA CoC Youth Committee
conducted, “See Us Now” the most extensive youth outreach survey to
date, among and with the help of homeless youth. The qualitative and
quantitative data collected, once analyzed, will help service providers better
understand the needs of homeless youth, and serve them accordingly. This effort
will be capped off with a “See Us Now” event in April 2018.
·Collin County – MDHA expanded its assistance to
Collin County providers, with an MDHA team member officing out of the
Assistance Center of Collin County three days a week, and assisting multiple
clients with housing navigation and placement.
·Housing Resources – MDHA conducted Housing Resource Clinics for the staff of six different
emergency shelters, to give them additional tools to house their guests. We expanded
housing search tools for case managers. As part of the Emergency Shelter
Housing Challenge, we will conduct Housing
Planning Clinics for clients, and encourage every client to build a “My
Housing Plan” framework to end their homelessness. An MDHA authored New Tenant Resource Guide, is now available
to all CoC member organizations. It is distributed to individual clients upon housing.
·Harvey Relief – MDHA,the City of Dallas,
the Dallas Foundation and Catholic Charities of Dallas joined forces to provide
housing, services and case management to 200 non-FEMA eligible families,
rendered homeless by Hurricane Harvey.
·Faith-Based
Organizations
– The Salvation Army is now using HMIS
for 100% of their programs. Discussions have begun with the Samaritan Inn
to join HMIS. We will seek to add other faith-based organizations to HMIS with
funding from the City of Dallas.
A new CoC Faith-based Collaborations Committee now meets monthly, to help
faith-based organizations do their part to help end homelessness.
·Street Outreach – MDHA provides support to the City of Dallas’ expanded street
outreach efforts, with resources and training,
and in solidifying inclusion in the Housing Priority List, as a standard
practice for street outreach.
·Racial Equity – MDHA is committed to ensuring
that racial equity permeate its work, as one of six communities working with
the Center for Social Innovation’s SPARC
project. MDHA has begun publishing a Homeless Response System Community
Dashboard Race Addendum[v],
to highlight racial disparities in homelessness and service delivery. An MDHA
delegation participated in the Center for Social Innovation’s first-of-its-kind
national summit on Racial Equity and Homelessness, in partnership with the
Raikes Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. MDHA will soon
conduct a survey of the demographic make-up of the senior management and board
officers of all federally funded service providers, with the goal of increasing
the diversity of these groups, so they better reflect the homeless population.
All homeless service
providers must practice full transparency, by reporting all data into the
Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), the federally-mandated
community wide database, that drives improvement of homeless services programs,
without exception (barring issues of safety). Reporting into HMIS is not simply
an issue of bureaucratic compliance. This is the only way we know if and how
much progress our community is making. More importantly, this is the only way
we can improve and self-correct, where we are not[i].
In the last three years, Dallas made huge strides,
specifically, in this area. For instance, as late as 2014, no emergency
shelter beds were reported into HMIS. It is impossible to assess system performance,
in the absence of data on the point of entry into homelessness. Therefore,
communities that do not have that data in their HMIS are routinely penalized
for it, as Dallas
was. However, unlike the housing programs, funded through the Continuum of Care
(CoC) Program, MDHA cannot simply require shelters to enter their data. MDHA
methodically worked with each of the major shelters, and over the last three
years brought most of them into the system. As of December 2017, with the
Salvation Army adding all of their 700 beds into the system, 57% of shelter
beds are now entered into HMIS. In 2018, we will meet and exceed the
standard set by the Federal Government, 86%. These simple numbers,
important as they are, bely a more fundamental shift in the HMIS, here
in Dallas. In
early 2015, MDHA and its partners began a discovery process that led the Continuum
of Care (CoC) to adopt a new HMIS system, built from the ground up, by a
non-profit founded by the Parkland
Health and Hospital System, PCCI[ii],and its for-profit affiliate,Pieces Tech[iii].This system was designed to be part of a larger ecosystem tracking individuals
as they move through the healthcare system and social service organizations, Pieces
Iris.
Dr.
Steve Miff, PCCI
Pieces Iris was born out of the recognition that limited
communication between the healthcare system and social service organizations,
may cause vital information to slip through the cracks. The idea was to create
a seamless system that connects healthcare and community-based organizations,
allowing for smart sharing of information that makes a tangible difference in
the lives of the most vulnerable populations[iv].
As PCCI President and CEO, Dr. Steve Miff, told theBecker Hospital Review[v],
in September 2017, “Up to 50 percent of clinical outcomes are driven by social,
economic or environmental factors, and not necessarily related to the direct
care the individual received. That has basically set the stage and created the
need for this solution to connect communities, and through that, to drive
personalized medicine." Over the course of the last
three years, MDHA, PCCI and Pieces Tech worked hand in hand to launch the new
HMIS, which went live in mid-2017. AsPolitico Magazine[vi]wrote in December 2017, Pieces Iris is already, “having a powerful impact on
overwhelmed homeless organizations in Dallas…
The availability of data showed… that homeless people were 167% more likely to
have emergency room visits than the non-homeless population, and that from 300
to 400 homeless were arrested in Dallas
each month. Neither of these pieces of information was shocking, but they gave
[MDHA President and CEO, Cindy J.] Crain data she could take to officials to
try to influence policy on homelessness. If she could show that housed people
needed fewer EMS transports, ER visits and less time in jail, then, she
reasoned, ‘I can make a business case to say, it’s not only the moral thing to
bring housing to these homeless, mentally ill people. It’s going to save you
money. If you don’t serve these people they’ll die in the street or eat you
alive with these public response systems.’” Finally, one glaring fact
that “jumps out” at anyone who analyzes the data on homelessness in Dallas, is the overrepresentation
of African Americans in the homeless population. Since late 2016, with the
support of theUnited Way of Metropolitan Dallas[vii]Unite Dallas Relief Fund[viii],we are
partnering with six other cities, towards establishing more racial equity in
homeless services, through SPARC (Supporting Partnerships
for Anti-Racist Communities)[ix],
a new research and action program from the Center
for Social Innovation(C4)[x].
