Feb. 15, 2017
Please forward to your sub grantees and contact your CHG program manager
if you have any questions.
Wow, have we been busy! If you
haven’t been to our website lately, now is the time. You will find links to the State Homeless Housing Strategic Plan and the Office of Homeless Youth Plan. The winter County Report Cards and Year to Year Comparisons are hot off the press. In addition, you will
find three useful papers that will help you understand and talk about the
homeless situation in our state: Why is Homelessness Increasing?, Counts of Homelessness: Different Counts and
What they Mean, and Overview of the Homeless Housing System and
Funding.
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The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction reported that 39,671 Washington students were without a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence at some point during the 2015-2016 school year. The most common situation for homeless students is doubled up (staying temporarily in someone else’s home), but the count also includes a significant number of students in hotels or motels, in shelters, or unsheltered. |
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Thurston County Housing and Essential Needs (HEN) participants share their success.
A 58-year-old female with severe depression and debilitating anxiety was enrolled in the homeless prevention HEN program in June 2015. During the 18 months that she was in the program, she accessed mental health counseling and found a successful regiment of anti-depressants and anxiety medication. She completed her college degree in September 2016. She then became a certified phlebotomist in November 2016, and is now able to support herself working as an on-call phlebotomist. When she last spoke with HEN case manager Valerie Ballew at the Community Action Council of Lewis, Mason, and Thurston, she said, “The HEN program saved my life! I was able to recover my mental health and rebuild my life.”
In March 2016 a 61-year-old man with early onset dementia was enrolled in the HEN program. He was homeless at the time. With a collaborative effort between his HEN case manager, Valerie, and a long- time friend, they were able to get him housed and engaged with case management services at Behavioral Health Resources. They were also able to track down his household goods at a storage facility and have them delivered to his new apartment. He is now under the care of a neurologist. He is able to support himself with Social Security and a pension. Whenever Valerie speaks with him, he expresses his gratitude for the HEN program.
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Operating
a homeless housing program is complex. Meeting the needs of your clients and
the demands of your funders can leave you feeling pulled in different directions,
and it’s easy to lose track of our real purpose. The good news is that service
providers, clients and funders agree on the big goal: permanent housing. This
goal should shape everything you do – developing a housing stability plan and
communicating with landlords, determining the amount of rent assistance and
collecting accurate data. Do you know how
effective your programs are at moving people into permanent housing quickly?
Ever wonder what to do if your Housing and Essential Needs (HEN) client has another person in their household? The income for all adult
household members seeking services together must be considered for stability
planning and determining rent subsidy.
A household is one or more individuals
seeking to obtain or maintain housing together. The entire household is
considered for eligibility determination and services. A household does not
include friends or family that are providing temporary housing. – Section 4,
CHG Guidelines
If a HEN client is renting a room
in a shared house, the income of the other residents need not be considered, so
long as the HEN rent subsidy is only for the portion of rent and utilities that
the HEN client is directly responsible for.
Prioritizing access to housing
and services is required when there are not enough resources to meet the
demand. If there are enough resources to serve all of the unsheltered people in
your community (in other words, your community is at functional zero*), there
is no need to use a vulnerability assessment or other needs-based assessment to
decide which unsheltered households to help – you can help them all!
*Functional zero unsheltered is
defined as the number of unsheltered homeless households moving into temporary
or permanent housing being equal to or greater than the number of current and
newly identified unsheltered homeless households. – CHG Guidelines, Appendix D
For too long, many shelters have exercised therapeutic incarceration – adding more and more programs within them that do not have a direct bearing on long-term housing success and which can actually incentivize homelessness. On the other hand, some shelters are so sparse in service delivery that it is no wonder there is no connection to permanent solutions.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness is partnering with OrgCode to offer How to Be an Awesome Shelter – a learning clinic that will provide a day and a half of intensive instruction and interaction. Shelters oriented toward housing are a critical part of ending homelessness. From intake procedures to staff engagement strategies, shelter rules to housing engagement, this learning clinic is rich in provocative content and practical solutions to improve positive destinations out of shelter. This clinic features specialized streams for families, youth and single adults.
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