^{Heading Home Hennepin Monthly Newsletter}

^{The Heading Home Hennepin monthly newsletter aims to be a resource for the community of individuals that work to increase housing stability for residents of Hennepin County.}

This month in the HHH Newsletter:

Featured Content

• County commits almost $74M to equitable housing relief and recovery activities

• Update on Covid-19 protective hotels

Continuum of Care Updates

• The development of a new coordinated entry assessment

Hennepin County Updates

• Announcing new leadership positions within the Office to End Homelessness
• NAEH features Hennepin County for their acquisition of hotels during the pandemic

Community Resources and Announcements 

• Minnesota Coalition of the Homeless 2021 Annual Conference
• Youthprise discussions: Disrupting with Purpose 
• Spread the Word: Heading Home Corps
• Stewardship Council Site-Based Supportive Housing Feedback Sessions

County commits almost $74M to equitable housing relief and recovery activities

Funds will go toward long-term affordable housing, support for people experiencing homelessness or at risk of eviction

On Tuesday, the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners voted to allocate $73.7 million in federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to support short- and long-term pandemic recovery efforts that will increase affordable housing, reduce homelessness and support renters at risk of eviction.

These investments will leverage learnings from Hennepin County’s pandemic response, positioning our communities to emerge stronger than we were when we entered this crisis.

County departments will have until the end of 2026 to spend the American Rescue Plan (ARP) dollars.

$46 million for housing recovery

Funding will support strategies to build stronger communities through investments in housing and neighborhoods, especially for communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, including low-income and communities of color.

With this funding, Hennepin County will:

• Increase affordable housing production: Immediately increase affordable multifamily housing production by providing financing that will help key affordable housing development projects open more quickly.
• Invest in Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing: Finance the preservation of Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) and address a backlog of deferred rehab and maintenance of NOAH properties
• Acquire properties: Purchase properties to turn into long-term affordable housing, especially single room occupancy housing for single adults impacted by the pandemic and facing homelessness or housing instability
• Expand homeownership: Establish new homeownership programs to help people disproportionately impacted by the pandemic build wealth through homeownership

These strategies will help create or preserve approximately 2,000 units of affordable housing and help more than 100 households buy homes.

Learn more about Hennepin County’s equitable housing recovery strategies.

$25.5 million for homelessness response

The county board also authorized spending up to $25.5 million in federal ARP funds to support shelter access and operations, to help people avoid homelessness and to help shelters continue to meet CDC public health standards.

With this funding, Hennepin County will:

• Support shelters: Help fund operations at Avivo Villages and the American Indian Community Development Corporation’s Homeward Bound, a new low-barrier, housing focused emergency shelter launched last winter
• Keep extended shelter hours: Continue 24/7 operations in shelters, a tool to help meet guests’ health and housing needs
• Reduce barriers to shelter: Eliminate self-pay contributions
• Strengthen alternatives to shelter: Help people to leverage community resources that are safe alternatives to emergency shelter during a housing crisis
• Make shelter safer: Work with emergency homeless shelters and board and lodge settings to make physical improvements and mitigate COVID-19 effects and enable compliance with COVID-19 precautions
• Prevent unsheltered homelessness: Reverse increases in unsheltered homelessness seen since the start of the pandemic by working with partners to develop a new model for working with people in encampments

The goal of this work is to help an additional 750 people access safe alternatives to shelter each year, provide safe shelter for 5,000 people each year and make the physical facilities safer and more compliant with COVID-19 precautions, and increase homelessness outreach capacity.

Learn more about Hennepin County’s response to homelessness.

$2.2 million to support people at risk of eviction

The board approved up to $2.2 million in federal ARP funds to help people at risk of eviction navigate housing court and get legal and financial help.

Some of Hennepin County’s most vulnerable renters may face eviction as state and federal eviction protections are phased out over the coming months.

Renters will continue to be protected from evictions for nonpayment of rent through June 2022 if they qualify for and have a completed application pending for emergency rent assistance through RentHelpMN or The Zero Balance Project.

To prepare for the end of eviction protections, Hennepin County is providing free legal representation in housing court and continues to help renters apply for emergency rental assistance.

To date, Hennepin County has allocated more than $78 million to COVID-19 emergency rent assistance, and $37 million of that has already been provided to Hennepin County renters.

Sign up for notifications for future request for proposals (RFP"s)

All funding and contracting opportunities are listed on the Supplier Portal.

Learn how to register with the Supplier Portal to receive notifications of new human services solicitations.

Update on Covid-19 protective hotels

Emergency response to covid-19

In March of 2020, it became apparent that COVID-19 was going to sweep across the United States. The earliest recommendations for slowing the spread of the virus were not possible at most shelters in Hennepin County due to the dense concentrations of shelter guests.

In other parts of the country, the virus was devastating shelters. There was a need to take quick action to prevent that kind of impact in both illness and loss of life in our community.

On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners allocated funding to secure alternative accommodations for those most at risk of severe illness or death from the virus, and additional, separate, isolation spaces for people who were sick or awaiting a test result.

On Thursday, March 19, 2020, the first people started leaving shelters for protective spaces in area hotels. This transition would not have been possible without the work of our valued partners from state and local agencies, non-profit and community organizations, philanthropy and resident volunteers.  

Necessity led to opportunity

From Day 1, the understanding was that the protective hotels were a temporary, emergency stopgap to provide safety to vulnerable residents in our community. At each hotel, residents stayed in private rooms, received meals, access to Health Care for the Homeless services, and case management as they worked on their post-pandemic housing plans.

It soon became evident that the 24/7 nature of accommodations provided additional opportunities for contact with residents and meant additional time to work with them on their housing plans.

In mid-June of 2020, the hotels to housing project was established to provide dedicated services to transition residents into permanent housing. As of today, over 320 people have been moved through those efforts to permanent housing and that number increases day on day, week on week.  

Phasing out of the protective hotels

The decision to stand up alternative accommodations for those most at risk of severe illness or death from the virus allowed time to improve the existing emergency shelter system. Hennepin County and our partners invested in facility improvements to ensure that emergency shelters meet strict CDC COVID-19 safety guidelines, offer 24/7 accommodations, and provide adequate staffing to implement rigorous cleaning and safety protocols. The county also invested funding to provide contracted maintenance staff to do deep cleaning at the shelters During this period, Hennepin County also started exploring the possibility of acquiring properties for the purpose converting them to permanent housing (See "NAEH features Hennepin County for their acquisition of hotels during the pandemic" below for more details).

With these measures in place, the protective hotels stopped accepting new guests in February 2021..Currently 213 people, utilizing 207 rooms, remain in the protective hotels. The closing date for the hotels is tied to the overall goal of moving all of the current guests into permanent housing as quickly as possible. The remaining guests are all being offered assistance as they transition into appropriate housing, As they do transition, the protective hotels program will continue to downsize until all guests have moved on and the protective hotel program has fully closed. 

Continuum of Care News

The development of a new Coordinated Entry assessment

The Hennepin CoC oversees the operation of the Hennepin Coordinated Entry System (CES). CES is a process that assesses, prioritizes, and refers youth, single adults, and families with the highest service needs and longest lengths of homelessness to available housing units that are dedicated to people experiencing homelessness.

On March 3, 2020, the Hennepin County Coordinated Entry System (CES) Leadership Committees voted to stop using the VI-SPDAT as part of the CES assessment. The VI-SPDAT was just one part of the assessment and one of the features of prioritization order.

Households are currently being prioritized using the following criteria:

• Disability (1st)
• Chronic homelessness (2nd)
• Number of HUD months homeless (3rd)

This prioritization order ensures that those experiencing chronic homelessness have a higher likelihood of being matched for housing.

Update on the revamp process

A stakeholder group made up of people with lived experience of homelessness (over half the group), community providers, representatives from the Hennepin County CES team, with guidance from C4 Innovations, has been meeting every other week for several months to identify missing questions, enhance current questions, and to ensure that at the core of this process is equity. 

Progress so far:

• Identified the needs and gaps and drafted new questions
• Identified the questions that were still relevant but needed modification
• Finalizing assessor script. The assessor script will aid assessors in better explaining the CE process and housing availability to households experiencing homelessness.

Next Steps & timeline:

• Finalize questions and script
• Implement new questions into HMIS and CES Connect
• Introduce and train new questions to assessors

The goal is to finish this process in the next 2 months.

To track the progress being made, subscribe to our Coordinated Entry newsletter, the CES Scoop for regular updates.

Hennepin County Updates

Announcing new leadership positions within the Office to End Homelessness

New Office to End Homelessness Manager 

After an intensive interview process that involved partners at AICDC, Catholic Charities and People Serving People, the City of Minneapolis and, critically, Street Voices of Change (who also helped write the final questions), 

Danielle Werder was selected as the new Area Manager for the Office to End Homelessness. There were many exceptional candidates for this key position but, ultimately, the panel and process led to Danielle being offered the position based on her achievements, her vision for the County, and her passion for ending homelessness. As a Planning Analyst for Hennepin County, Danielle led many initiatives including:

• working with shelter providers to redesign the way our shelter system works, which improved people’s certainty over where they will sleep at night, and providing a new data infrastructure that helped us understand who was using the system.
• coordinating with internal and external partners to structure our community’s approach to ending chronic homelessness, through which more than 800 people have been housed to date.
• project managing the ‘Hotels to Housing’ pandemic efforts that have seen 320+ people who are senior or medically fragile move to permanent housing, avoiding the mass returns to shelter that other communities are facing.

Please join us as we congratulate Danielle on her new role!

New program manager to oversee housing focused case management team

After a robust selection process, we are very happy to announce that Lynn Shafer will be moving into the new Program Manager role in the Office to End Homelessness and will be supporting the incoming supervisors, community health workers and case management assistants in meeting the goal of housing 1000 people experiencing homelessness per year. The interview panel included people from different areas in the County, Simpson Housing Services and Street Voices of Change (who helped draft two of the interview questions).

Lynn has been managing the Hennepin County Homeless Access team since right before the start of the pandemic and has done an incredible job of supporting her team as they stood up the protective sites back in March of 2020 and then shifted to supporting the Hotels to Housing project by working to house all of the people staying in the high-risk hotels. Her leadership and teamwork has helped to support over 320 people move into permanent housing and she has been integral in creating a collaborative and positive team dynamic. Before coming to the Homeless Access team Lynn was an Investigator in Child Protection for 14 years and then moved into a supervisor role for another 4 years. Lynn will move into the new Program Manager position on August 30th and lead the exciting development and implementation of this new case management team within Housing Stability!

Please congratulate Lynn on this exciting new opportunity!

NAEH features Hennepin County for their acquisition of hotels during the pandemic

Hennepin County was recently featured by the Nation Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) for their work on converting hotels into housing with COVID funds. 

NAEH created several case studies that outline some of the most noteworthy hotels-to-housing initiatives across the country. Hennepin County is one of the initiatives that was highlighted. 

(Click to view the Hennepin County case study)

The Hennepin County case study highlights the program which "acquired 165 new units in four separate properties. For the duration of the pandemic, these properties are being used to shelter homeless older adults and people with pre-existing medical conditions. To date, 31 of those units have been converted to permanent SRO housing, with the remainder scheduled for
conversion to permanent SRO housing by mid-year 2022."

It also includes an overview of the funding sources that were implemented, the administrative approach that guided the initiative, and the overall project development process. Key success factors and the major lessons learned for each effort are also included in the study. 

Community Resources and Announcements

Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless (MCH) has made the decision to have the 2021 Annual Conference move to a virtual format to protect the health and safety of all attendees, the people they serve, and our community members. 

The Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless (MCH) Annual Conference brings together over 600 individuals from across the region working to ensure every Minnesotan has a stable, affordable place to call home. The two-day convening includes about 50 workshops, networking, advocacy, and continuing education opportunities. A broad range of community members attend the event, including individuals who are currently or formerly homeless, direct service providers, policy advocates, tribal members, funders, administrators, federal, state, and county officials, and MCH member organizations. Register here.

Scholarships are available for people who have experienced homelessness, would like to attend the conference, and financially are unable to do so. Apply for a scholarship here. 

Spread the word for Heading Home Corps

Heading Home Corps is a new AmeriCorps program that provides people-power to help increase our capacity. Sites will receive full-time Housing Resource Navigator(s) who will spend the year helping clients overcome barriers and achieve their housing goals.

We’re looking for great people, especially people with lived experience related to experiencing homelessness, and hope you will help us spread the word.

This is an amazing opportunity for our communities statewide and we don’t want to miss the chance to meet urgent needs!

The Essential Details: 

As AmeriCorps members, Housing Resource Navigators will serve 40 hours a week, from September 2021 through July 2022.

Navigators receive:

• A stipend of $750 every two weeks
• Individual health insurance (monthly premium 100% paid)
• Up to an additional $6,345 for tuition or student loans

In order to begin serving in September, candidates need to apply by August 25. Please share this information in your networks and urge others to apply!

To learn more or apply, please visit www.servetogrow.org/headinghome.

Thank you for helping us leverage this incredible opportunity!

Stewardship Council Site-Based Supportive Housing Feedback Sessions

You’re invited: Site-based Supportive Housing Standards Stakeholder Feedback Sessions

Do you live in or work with people who live in site-based supportive housing?

The Stewardship Council is seeking feedback on proposed standards for site-based supportive housing. These standards will help inform future funding decisions and contribute to strengthening the supportive housing infrastructure statewide.

Site Based Supportive Housing Invite flyer.pdf

Sign up for one of the dates below. All the meetings will include the same content and format, but we encourage you to sign up based on whether you primarily live/work in the Twin Cities Metro Area or Greater Minnesota.

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