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March 2016
Please forward to your sub grantees and contact your CHG program manager
if you have any questions.
March may have
rolled in like a lion, but thanks to the Consolidated Homeless Grant managers
it will roll out like a lamb. Commerce hosted over 90 Lead Grantees and direct
services providers to review grant guidelines over three and a half days
earlier this month. This exercise will help ensure that the people experiencing
homelessness who received help through these grant funds receive efficient and effective
support as they move toward more stable and permanent housing.
New information to review on the website includes
Consolidated
Homeless Grant program managers are working to ensure we help every eligible
HEN client in Washington State!
State Fiscal Year
(SFY) 2016
Some HEN funds were
unspent between July and December 2015 and we are re-obligating to CHG
contracts so that we can spend out the entire SFY 2016 funds by June 30. Ensuring that all unsheltered HEN clients
receive housing assistance remains our first priority for funding. Keeping current eligible HEN clients housed
and carefully targeting to people at imminent risk (see
additional and new requirements in section 4.1 and 7.5 of the CHG Guidelines)
is also important.
SFY 2017
New SFY 2017 HEN
awards (and additional CHG awards to communities that didn’t receive a HEN
budget line item) will be made through an additional grant amendment in June.
Commerce is
preparing for the audit on the For-Profit spending requirement (section 2.3.2 and Appendix
E of the CHG
Guidelines.) Site visits
to your agencies are tentatively planned for April and May – we will let you
know when we receive the schedule. Let your CHG program manager know if you
have questions; we are here to help!
Cowlitz, Mason, and Thurston counties were
selected to participate in the 100 Day Challenge
to End Family Homelessness that kicked off Feb. 25. The kickoff event helped
these counties set goals to rapidly reduce family homelessness. Aspire
Consulting, led by Kathie Barkow, will lead ongoing technical assistance to
those counties until June. A final assessment and report available in July will
identify potential best practices for other counties and state agencies.
The Washington Low Income Housing
Alliance is excited to announce that registration for
the annual Conference on Ending Homelessness is now open. The conference will
take place May 11 - 12, 2016 at the Spokane Convention Center in Spokane, Wash. As the largest annual convening of
homelessness stakeholders in Washington State, it will bring together over 600
people regionally and from neighboring states. This year's program will
offer a wide diversity of direct service and advocacy skill building trainings,
networking opportunities, and opportunities to discuss on how we can
collectively continue to strengthen our state's movement to ensure all people
have access to safe, healthy, and affordable homes.
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Pre-Conference Supportive Housing Services Medicaid
Training May 10
In addition to the Conference on
Ending Homelessness, two additional trainings will take place the day before
the conference begins on May 10. We will be offering a Pre-Conference Supportive Housing Services Medicaid
benefit training for permanent
supportive housing providers and those interested in using this new,
targeted Medicaid benefit. We will also be offering an Emerging Advocates Program advocacy training for people with
direct experience of housing instability/homelessness.
In November 2013,
Commerce housing contractors from the Ending Family Homelessness pilot used
eJAS website as a referral and case management tool. The pilot is coming to an end
March 30.
We learned that the
collaborative relationship between housing providers and the local Community Service Office's (CSO) is key
to improving access to housing services for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Though we will not roll
out the Housing Pathway to other housing providers, participants shared some
best practices to increase collaboration and improve client outcomes.
- Co-location: Clients didn’t
have to visit two places when housing providers co-located at their local
CSO.
- Joint case management: When
staff from the CSOs and the housing providers sat together to
collaborate on case management, better outcomes for clients resulted.
- Joint learning: Staff from
CSOs and housing providers learned more about their similar work to
support clients and how to leverage each other’s strengths to support
clients.
Agencies
are required to have an updated, signed Agency Partner Agreement and
Interagency Data Sharing Agreement on file with Commerce and stored locally in
order to “go live” on the new system April 1. To ensure we can continue
collecting and recording important data about people experiencing homelessness,
please sign these agreements locally and
return them to Commerce no later than March 31 in order to have full access
to the new HMIS and all your migrated client data on April 1.
If you
are not an agency that participates in data sharing with other agencies on
HMIS, then simply printing a copy of the Agency Partner Agreement and sending
it back to us signed by your executive authority is all you need to do. If you
do participate in data sharing locally and want to continue to do so on the new
system, please also circulate the Interagency Data Sharing Agreement locally
and return it signed to Commerce.
Please
email or call Mary Schwartz (mary.schwartz@commerce.wa.gov or
360-725-2982) if you have any questions about the agreements you need to sign
and/or anything else related to HMIS. New client consent forms, revocation of consent
forms, and user ethics forms are still under revision and will be distributed
for use locally no later than April 1.
The HMIS Training Catalog is now updated with many training opportunities
in March and early April. These trainings are either webinar based or located
in Olympia at the Department of Commerce. All HMIS users must take new
software training before they can start using the new HMIS software, Clarity,
beginning April 1. All new users must take both the “HMIS New User” and “HMIS
New Software” trainings offered back-to-back, in-person, or as one complete
webinar.
Lead Grantees must work with their county and are responsible for
ensuring that the Annual County Report/Homeless Housing Inventory (section
2.1.3.2 of the CHG Guidelines) is sent to Commerce by April 4. The report provides a portfolio of homeless
housing resources in your community of housing, programs, capacity and funding
that advocates and service providers can use to consider new strategies and
goals to reduce homelessness.
This webinar will
review the history of Employment First, its implications for Washington state,
and its role in advancing employment for people with mental illness and
substance use disorders, featuring David Hoff, Project Manager for the
Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts. The webinar is scheduled for March
17, 2016 from 8:30 - 10 a.m. PDT.
Commerce presented the following information at the Association of
County Human Services meeting on March 16.
In July 2019 the document recording fees dedicated to
homelessness will drop 62%, resulting in approximately 22,000 fewer people
receiving assistance. (RCW 36.22.179
and RCW
36.22.1791)
The Association of Washington Cities has a new interactive tool using
U.S. Census data to profile your city’s economic condition, demographic
breakdown, housing stock, and more.
Whether it's
helping a vulnerable child, making highways safer or restoring salmon habitat,
the work that we do matters to the people of Washington State. Find out about
current job openings and sign up for job alerts:
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