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].
During herState
of the Homeless Addresson March 21, 2018, Cindy J. Crain, MDHA
President and CEO, shared the results of the 2018 Homeless Count in Dallas and CollinCounties. The numbers
showed an increase in homelessness, in general, and unsheltered homelessness,
specifically, accompanied by drops in chronic and veteran homelessness. That
same week, the Collin County Homeless Coalition published its report, which
showed a drop in the number of those experiencing homelessness in that county.
Not surprisingly, it takes the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) many more months to report on the results for the entire country. In the meantime, we do have
the 2017 numbers, which came out fairly recently, this last December, with
HUD’s submission ofPart I of its 2017 Annual Homeless
Assessment Report (AHAR)to Congress on Point-in-Time Estimates of
Homelessness. HUD reported that, “Homelessness increased for the first time in
seven years. The number of people experiencing homelessness increased by a
little less than one percent between 2016 and 2017.” Interestingly, though,
this aggregate number reflects two separate phenomena: “This increase reflected
a nine percent increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness in
unsheltered locations, which was partially offset by a three percent decline in
the number of people experiencing homelessness in sheltered locations.” More importantly, HUD
emphasized that this is primarily an urban problem: “Recent increases in
homelessness were driven mostly by specific changes happening within cities.
Increases in the numbers of unsheltered individuals in the 50 largest cities
accounted for nearly all of the national increase…The number of all people experiencing
homelessness increased in major cities and decreased elsewhere between 2016 and
2017… More specifically, increases in unsheltered homelessness in major cities
drove the national increase…”
One of our homeless friends
at an encampment in 2017 (Photo taken by award
winning photographer, B.J. Lacasse)
Why is this? What is going
on in our cities? An earlier HUD report, Worst Case Housing Needs – 2017 Report to
Congress, may help us understand: Worst case housing needs
are a national problem. Such severe housing problems have expanded dramatically
during the past decade and were exacerbated by the economic recession and
associated collapse of the housing market, which reduced homeownership through
foreclosures and tight lending and increased demand for renting. The slight
improvements observed since 2011 offer cause for hope, but the failure to
sustain the more promising trends observed in 2013 is sobering… The latest
resumption of worsening housing problems among the nation’s very low-income
renters is attributable primarily to demographic and economic
factors—especially a notable shift from homeownership to renting—that grew the
number of households susceptible to worst case needs. Uneven housing market
responses that increased the proportion of unassisted very low-income renters
with severe rent burdens played a secondary yet substantial role. Even with rental
assistance, 6 of 10 extremely low-income renters and 4 of 10 very low-income
renters do not have access to affordable and available housing units. Among
very low-income renters in 2015, only 25 percent of households had rental
assistance and an additional 43 percent had worst case needs for assisted or
other affordable housing. In other words, only a small share of very low-income
renters—32 percent—avoided severe housing problems in the unassisted private
rental market in 2015. And where is this problem
most pronounced? “Central cities were home to most (9.51 million) very
low-income renters, followed by suburbs (7.23 million) and nonmetropolitan
areas (2.49 million).” The report emphasizes that the main culprit in this
crisis is the lack of affordable rental housing in the nation’s urban centers. Arguably, what we have is
not a homelessness crisis, but an acute affordable housing crisis, and the
epicenter of that crisis is in our cities, including Dallas and other urban
communities in Texas.
Aswe wrote, about a year ago, “Housing
is the key… Local governments must act now to create affordable housing… We
need more permanent supportive housing, more second chance housing, and more
affordable housing in the 0-30% AMI (Area Median Income) range.” And HUD’s
prescription is clear: “A broad strategy at the federal, state, and local
levels is needed to continue to rebuild the economy, strengthen and realign
markets, and provide assistance to those families most in need.”
Two of our formerly homeless
friends (Photo taken by award
winning photographer, B.J. Lacasse)
The emphasis on the federal
level is well warranted. The current level of federal funding for theContinuum of Care Program, just over $2 billion, is
essentially a rounding error in a $4 trillion Federal Budget. We can’t expect
to end homelessness, with this level of investment. As we wrotein December: “Especially over the
last decade, we have become extremely skillful at building systems that
maximize the impact of these $2 billion. However, as a nation, we have not
explored the idea of significantly adding to that funding. We have accepted…
that around $2 billion, in 2017 dollars, is enough to defeat a social ill that
has been with us for forty years and counting.”
Ann Oliva Former Deputy Assistant Secretary,
HUD
However, we do need to do
our part here in Dallas and CollinCounties,
and specifically the urban core of Dallas,
to address this affordable housing crisis, that is driving the increase in
homelessness. This is why on March 28-29, 2018, we brought together all of the
major “players”, in Dallas and Collin Counties, who can affect this type of
change on the local level, for a Homeless Response System Leadership Training
and Strategic Planning Retreat. This groundbreaking gathering was facilitated
byOrgCode,
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.
Dr. Iain De Jong (Courtesy of the Salt LakeTribune)
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. We look forward to sharing
the report OrgCode will produce to help our community flesh out the next steps.
Then, united in vision and purpose, we will act on those decisions, and fulfill
those commitments. That is how, working together, as a community, we can and
will make homelessness in Dallas and CollinCounties,
rare, brief and nonrecurring.
