It's All about the People

Our new not so secret weapon, Lester Collins, Jr., with our veteran not so secret weapon, Freda Coleman, HMIS trainer extraordinaire (and expert selfie taker!)

We may talk about systems and solutions based research, results and data, but what really ends homelessness is people, doing the work, to build those systems and implement those solutions. This is the reason for MDHA's most recent hire, Lester Collins, Jr., in the newly created position of Continuum of Care (CoC) Performance Analyst. Lester possesses an array of skills earned as a clinician, chaplain, social science professor, and program manager of federal and state programs. He is a doctoral candidate at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), and helped conduct a 2012 UTA-DHA-MDHA collaborative study on homelessness. Simply put, the man breathes research, results and data! That said, Lester always keep in mind, "that any numbers I work with and policies and programs I work on, represent and affect real, living and breathing people, who deserve communities that are responsive to their needs."

If you accept the argument that what really makes up our system is people, what follows is that each person's best resource is... all the rest of the people in the system! One of the first things our Vice President, Rebecca Cox, noticed, when she joined MDHA a little over year ago (Congrats on the work anniversary, Rebecca!) was that the most important folks, the very lynch pins, without whom there is no system, Case Managers, were not familiar enough with their own colleagues. They are just so busy doing the work, helping those experiencing homelessness! With this in mind, she founded the Case Manager Networking Round Table, where these professionals are able to get together every month. Together they study an important subject that will help them, help those experiencing homelessness, while getting to know each other a little better. Then when they have a need or hit a roadblock in their work, they can call upon the variety of colleagues they now know, who do what they do, day in and day out.

Our CoC Assembly leaders, Edd Eason and Dustin Perkins, with the able help of our CoC Resource Manager, Shavon Moore, recently "imported" this idea to the recent meeting of the Assembly. This last meeting was spent not sitting in rows listening to reports and doing regular business, which is always important. Instead, as you can see in the picture below, seating this time was "family style", and the groups discussed specific questions regarding the NOFA and CoC Competition. However, an openly stated goal of this session was to allow participants to get to know each other, so they could draw on each other's help throughout this important process, and beyond. It was a fabulous session!

CoC Assembly hard at work

We depend on people in one more very important way. People, as individuals, and making up organizations and businesses, provide financial support, without which we could not do our work. This past month we were honored to receive two notable contributions: The Carl B. and Florence E. King Foundation contributed $15,000 to the MDHA Flex Fund, and the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) contributed $2,500 to MDHA's general fund. These contributions, show the Federal Government that our community is willing to "have skin in the game," and considers the former as a true partner. Let's make sure King and EPIC don't get "lonely" now! Join them in making your own contribution, as an individual, a business or an organization, and strike your own blow in the fight to end homelessness, in our home, Dallas and Collin Counties.

Busiest Time of the Year

The official seal of HUD

Things never seem to slow down at MDHA, so after writing the above headline, I hesitated for a moment. However, it is difficult to argue that now is not the busiest time of the year for us. In fact, if you happen to interact with any of the folks, who are funded through the Continuum of Care (CoC), don't be surprised if they look a little harried, perhaps mumbling strange sounds like NOFA, eSNAPS, PRAC, LOCCS, and more. If they are worried about their APR, it is not their mortgage they are preoccupied with, and if they are filling out a scorecard, they are not wasting their work hours on their fantasy baseball teams.

So, what is going on? Once a year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issues its Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA), through which it makes (this year) about $1.9 billion for the funding of CoC programs in every American community (a little less than $17 million for Dallas). The vast majority of these funds go to housing programs for those experiencing homelessness, with the remainder going to the infrastructure of homeless response systems. Programs do not apply on their own, rather as part of their local CoCs, and the entire process is managed by lead agencies, like MDHA, who are the designated collaborative applicants, on behalf of communities.

All of this seemingly dry technical work is guided by HUD's robust vision is to end homelessness. As the HUD website states: "HUD is committed to working with our federal, state, and local partners to end homelessness. We've made tremendous progress in recent years, including a 21% drop in chronic homelessness and a 33% drop in veteran homelessness. To achieve the goals of Opening Doors, and end homelessness, we've got to build on what we know works by strengthening interagency collaboration and investing in proven approaches such as Housing First." (Emphasis ours)

Here is the kicker, and one of the reasons this process, which can occur at a totally different random time every year (Yay!), pretty much subsumes the CoC collaborative applicant, and those in each agency that are in charge of the agency portion of this huge application: This funding, which for Dallas approaches $17 million, is anything but automatic! In fact, the process is referred to as a competition, because that is what it is. Communities and programs that do a good job at ending homelessness get funded and can even get extra funding, and communities and programs that don't do a good job, well, you know the rest... 

Learning and Practice (the NOFA is here!)

Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives.

At MDHA we strive to be a learning organization internally, and we see one of our most important fields of activity in enhancing the knowledge and performance of our grantees and partners through a variety of learning, training, networking and development opportunities. Our President and CEO, Cindy J. Crain, even shares her reading list, as part of the State of the Homeless Address.

Perhaps one of the most important books in our field just came out earlier this year, Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives. This book, written by the people who first developed the Housing First model, is eminently readable, as well as well-sourced. We are reading it, and we recommend you do too. We are even posting choice quotes on our social media. We are also brushing up on Opening Doors, the national strategic plan to end homelessness. We will be regularly posting key ideas from this document that guides our work, and the work of our counterparts in every American community, on our social media.

This learning will be tremendously helpful, as we enter the busiest, most critical time of the year for any CoC, the Continuum of Care (CoC) Program Competition. The Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) just came out, and we don't have much time! We have created a dedicated page on our website for the local competition, to help our grantees and potential grantees, which you can bookmark. We will be putting out regular notices on that page, through our CoC listserv, the Constant Contact list, and on our social media. Good luck!