September 7, 2017
A
proposal to the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance to develop a
network of local committees to reach and assist the homeless members
of the communities to get services, find housing, be registered in
the HMIS, and be counted during the PIT Count.
Preamble:
The
vision of ending homelessness is a bold and audacious one; in the
context of a society which uses hard-wall housing and property to
promote security and stability, it proclaims the right of every
person to security and stability, through housing that is safe and
confers dignity, a right that has never previously been achieved in
American history. Such an audacious goal deserves an audacious plan.
Core Vision: Everyone is Known To
Someone
Every homeless person in our county will be
known to at least one other member of the community, who as a member
of a local Everyone Known to Someone Committee, is a human face from
the community, inviting the homeless person into a fuller
relationship with the other members of the community, its resources,
and the opportunities that are available. Denominated by respect and
compassion for a fellow community member, these relationships provide
the possibility of a dignified passage for the homeless person back
into full membership in the community, including having a safe,
secure home.
Core Model: The local committee
To provide support and structure to those who would
be engaging with homeless persons and families, local committees
would be recruited or created. These local committees will be
town-specific, autonomous and self sustaining. They will be drawn
from the local pool of compassionate persons who are willing to
volunteer their time to cultivate and maintain these relationships.
There are many ways to find these volunteers, and many of them are
already organized and serving the homeless community. Being locally
autonomous, local committees could engage in local publicity, make
their own decisions about how to identify and how to approach
homeless persons, and build on their existing systems of supports,
such as meals and food shelves. Our task would be to create a clear
structure and provide supports to achieve their goals and ours. They
in turn would have a relationship with us, and help us to deliver
services, get folks into the HMIS, and do the PIT count. The
“Everyone Known to Someone” group would strategize with the local
committees to connect the homeless candidate with an HMIS licensed
provider for data input and case management, and give them training
in how to do the PIT count.
Time
Line and Action Sequence
Timing in the initial
stages of the outreach effort will be significantly impacted by
recent events in Burlington. The Burlington City Council has passed
motions to address issues attached to homeless persons, setting up a
study group to propose ways to address these issues. It has been
proposed in Alliance meetings that the Chittenden County Homeless
Alliance might wish to respond to these motions.
Outreach to
establish the town-based committees and to address the opportunities
of the study group, in some cases, would be congruent and for
identical purposes. We will want to be alert to unexpected
opportunities and unanticipated obstacles, avoid being distracted
from our plan by racing events, and yet be mindful of how to advance
our plan if circumstances seem propitious.
When the pace of
events slows, we will need to revisit our intended time-line and
action sequence.
Building on existing
relationships
The strategy for building this network
recognizes existing networks and relationships. To build a
sustainable network we will need and want the buy-in of the existing
political structures of each community, so that they can validate our
work to the members of their communities. We will have demonstrated
respect by going to them with our plan first, and build respect
between the Alliance and the towns we are mandated to serve. So while
members of the Alliance can provide informal notice to members of
their own networks, including those in the towns in which they live,
the Alliance, as a county-wide entity, would formally approach the
Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, and establish a
relationship with it, first. Then through its relationships, the
CCRPC will connect the Alliance with town Select-boards, police
departments, rescue services, and libraries. The police and rescue
teams are very likely to know the homeless members of their
communities, so it will be helpful to the local committee to have
working relationships with these public safety entities. The
libraries are hot-spots for activity of the self-sufficient homeless,
so their participation in the local committees will be essential.
With these relationships initiated, at least at the elected
official level, we would begin out reach to those who are delivering,
or would like to deliver, services to the homeless. Candidates
include fraternal organizations and churches. There are many people
of compassion who would welcome a structured relationship with
homeless folks and the Alliance, especially with a promise that the
homeless would get services, because it will provide an enhancement
of their own mission-driven efforts.
There are many ways to
reach volunteers. The Alliance members will have more ideas than
comes to the mind of this writer. Certainly, we could ask local media
to tell the story of our outreach, we could possibly get VPR to do a
radio segment about our outreach, and we can post on FPF and
Craigslist, just to name a few. Alliance participants themselves
could be part of local committees, providing a live connection
between the committees and the Alliance.
PIT
Counts
PIT counts (Point In Time counts) punctuate the
implementation of this plan. The time before the next PIT count in
2018 is now less than five months, an amount of time that could be
sufficient for: review, revision and passage of this plan; initial
outreach to the CCRPC; development of a web presence for this effort;
and possibly beginning to reach out to some of the Chittenden County
towns. Since most of these actions are sequential, we will do what we
can and review the Action Sequence at a future date. A corollary
activity not dependent on this sequence is upgrading the PIT count
technology. More on this below.
The year between the 2018 PIT
count and the 2019 stands up the remainder of the work proposed by
this plan. The “Everyone Known to Someone” working group will be
charged with managing relationships with the towns. With guidance as
needed from the Steering Committee, the work group will make
strategic decisions about when to reach out to a given town, and what
resources to commit. Resources will be mostly in the form of members
of the Alliance using their time to contact, engage, and develop
relationships with towns, police and rescue departments, libraries,
churches, fraternal organizations, and who ever else steps forward.
This proposal envisions some participants of the Alliance assisting
the working group in the towns of their residence. The working group
will be charged with negotiating these relationships, and developing
the local committees, which will provide the sustainable and
self-sufficient group for interacting with the Alliance.
Presuming
a successful introduction from the Planning Commission to the towns,
the work group will want to act quickly to solidify its contacts at
the town level, and presuming that the work group cannot move forward
with all towns simultaneously, maintain living relationships with the
towns with which it will plan to engage later. Development of the
local committees will most likely follow a “low-hanging fruit”
pattern, in which small investments from us will result in some
strong and active local groups. The committee must take advantage of
such opportunities, and be mindful it does not ignore less ready
towns. It might set goals which include development of committees at
different places on the scale of difficulty. However, these are
strategic decisions that belong to the working group.
If
committee development proceeds very quickly in some towns, by 2018 a
local committee might be ready to do a PIT count, but this would be a
precocious development. By 2019, however, we would expect many of the
local committees to be equipped to do the PIT count. In the
meanwhile, Coordinated Entry will have been implemented, and many of
the homeless persons these committees get to know will have been
entered into HMIS. (As an autonomous decision making body, some
committees might report having housed some of their homeless without
passing through Coordinated Entry. As a method for building
relationships and community, this would be a good outcome.)
Training
Training for the
committees will include: social-emotional education from experienced
outreach workers, on how best to develop relationships with persons
who are un-housed or precariously housed; what information is needed
for the HMIS, with the possibility of pre-collection; and how to
execute the PIT count. It is hoped that through coordination with the
HMIS data base, the PIT count can be simplified and made more
accurate. Discussions are underway with ICA employees on how this can
be done.
Coordinated Entry
According
to the emerging Coordinated Entry process, a simple screening tool
will be used to direct homeless clients to a “Hub”, where they
will receive assessment and prioritization. Local committee members
will be trained to screen homeless persons for which assessment hub
to use. Committee members can also be asked about resources available
in their communities, to incorporate into the Coordinated entry
system.
Youth, Veterans, DV, Families
Members
of local committees can be trained to recognize members of these
groups, how to offer aid, and how to provide initial screening.
Referral to professionals in these fields can be as slow or quick as
the client seems to need.
Ethics
Local
committee members and homeless persons will need protection by a code
of ethics. Examples include compulsory anonymity, prohibitions
against inviting the homeless person into a private home, and
prohibitions against providing loans or grants. This system of ethics
can be developed from recommendations from the existing street
outreach team and in reflection on the differences between street
outreach and local committee services, in an active conversation
during the development phase of the local committees. Ethics will
also evolve from experience.
The
Maintenance Phase
Depending on the
experience of the working group, the year following the 2019 PIT
count could be the year that relationships with the local groups
reach equilibrium. We must expect these relationships to be dynamic
and in cycles of growth and decay. The “Everyone Known to Someone”
(EKS) working group can be expected to have developed its operational
tool kit, literature, website, visitation patterns, support tools,
etc., and be settled into its routines of training and support of the
local groups. Hence, the development phase of this plan would
feather-off sometime in 2019. The plan then enters its maintenance
phase.
Once local committees are established, each town and
local committee in Chittenden County will be in relationship with the
Alliance through its local committee. This proposal contemplates: an
annual conference of the local committees to discuss best practices
and to develop relationships; participation in Alliance meetings by
some members of local committees; and local committee members being
active in the “Everyone Known to Someone” working group. The EKS
group will: maintain relationships with local and county authorities
sufficient to achieve the goals of the Alliance; monitor the needs of
local committees; provide training as needed; and facilitate
collection of HMIS and PIT count data. This proposal envisions
collaboration between autonomous entities who share related or
congruent goals, and presumes that these relationships will be in
flux and require ongoing attention from the EKS working group.
Branding
Local
Committees will largely have their own identification. The Chittenden
County Homeless Alliance will facilitate their work and its own by
providing a badge or icon the local committee can add to its
literature, store front, library, church or other publicity. Combined
with Alliance marketing efforts, the local committee identified by
the icon or badge will be understood by the community members,
homeless and housed, as the place to go locally to get help.
Technology
The paper and input technology currently in use for
the PIT count is slow, labor intensive and allows poor quality of
data. I propose to adapt our technology to allow, in 2018, data to be
input directly into a smartphone version of the existing
questionnaire. I further propose that, with BoS, we investigate new
technology to make the PIT count efficient, and accurate, and in full
accord with HUD requirements, to be implemented in 2019 or 2020.
Housing Precarious
In its
discussions, interest has been expressed by Alliance participants to
understand the volume and nature of the precariously housed
population. How and whether to do this is a larger conversation, but
the local committees can be expected to provide important support to
any effort we devise.
Local Committees In
Burlington
While this proposal aims to organize across
Chittenden County, in an effort to provide human scale relationships
to members of the homeless community where they are more dispersed,
it may be Burlington where this effort is most needed. Since it is
Burlington where the most resources are concentrated, the “Everyone
Known to Someone” strategy may need to be modified. I propose to
learn from the experiences of the local committees, to understand
best practices, and turn this strategy toward Burlington at some
unknown future date, when lessons from this strategy seem ready and
helpful.
Impacts
We do not know
how many homeless persons are populating the rural and suburban
domains of Chittenden County, and this effort will help us to
ascertain that number. However many there are, this effort will:
fulfill our mandate to deliver services with equity across our
assigned geography; assure us that, to the extent possible, someone
has reached out to homeless persons and families where ever they are;
provide a tool for assaying the precariously housed population; and
create, in communities which may be hostile to homeless persons, an
institutional device to extend compassion, impelling the local
communities to become familiar with the human dimensions of
homelessness and poverty, potentially altering cultural attitudes
toward this population. While our goal is to “End
Homelessness”, this plan reaches further, to “End
Community-less-ness”. Each implies the other, each supports the
other. We can strive for both.
