MDHA is building a CAS for Dallas and Collin
Counties, based on the successful
model implemented in Tarrant
County. The Tarrant County Homeless Coalition (TCHC),
led by Cindy J. Crain, was an early adopter in the world of effective homeless
response systems and CAS. One of the early discoveries that Crain and her team
made was that they needed a well-oiled system not only for a prioritization of
services, based on a person’s needs, as stated above, but also for
determination and documentation of each person’s status.
Why is this? Every housing
program operates under very specific rules and regulations. The most basic of
these define who is homeless, who is chronically homeless, and which housing
solutions such status makes them eligible for. Other rules and regulations
further segment these populations. Some programs are specific to veterans, but
only veterans with specific types of discharges. Other programs are specific to
persons with HIV/AIDS. Some programs are for only for single men and women, and
others are only for families. These bureaucratic “hoops”, if not kept in mind
and managed, may cause the best of systems to grind to a halt.
The TCHC team realized that
if the housing priority list was to remain true to its name, rather than become
another in a series of meaningless waiting lists, they needed to place a
premium on documentation. Each client needed to have a documentation and
priority status or DOPS. They needed a DOPS Coordinator to work on this task
and this task only, so providers could easily “pull” persons off of the housing
priority list without any bureaucratic holdups. At the above mentioned “front
door” i.e. the point of assessment, all documents regarding a person’s history
and status were to be collected. These would include birth certificates,
driver’s licenses, marriage certificates, social security cards, military
discharge papers, documents proving a person has a disability or HIV/AIDS, and
documents attesting to one’s homelessness. Frequently, not all of these are
readily available, and so the DOPS Coordinator would work with the service
provider helping the client in obtaining these documents. Once all necessary
documents were obtained, housing programs could then pull persons that match
their programs, in order of priority off of the list and house them. This flow
chart that MDHA uses today clarifies this in a visual way:
The TCHC team also realized
they needed to create a set of Coordinated Assessment Prioritization Guidelines
(the DOPS Matrix), that cross referencing each person’s DOPS status with a
person’s level of vulnerability and need would guide housing providers, in
deciding who needed to be housed first. This is the DOPS Matrix. It helpfully
awards a priority ranking to each person, based on multiple factors, and
simplifies the job of housing providers in a systematic way. By clicking here, you can see
the DOPS Matrix in use by MDHA today.
