Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 (Agenda)
Item 27
Item no.
27.
consider and take appropriate action on the following items for the ending community homelessness coalition: a, update on the organization's goals, accomplishments and future plans; and b, request for monetary and staff resources to achieve mutual goals.
>> good morning, I will not do the job she did in providing testimony to you, but hopefully I can give you an overview and answer any questions that you have.
I do have a powerpoint that will kind of walk through that I know is also in your backup materials.
as you know from the materials, echo is -- is the community coalition that brings together all of the service providers and housing providers that are focused on these issues to try to have a coordinated response.
an effective response tending homelessness in our community.
briefly, echo was formed, the predecessor to echo was formed back in the mid 1980s when homelessness became a more significant problem throughout the country.
became a group of can, mayor watson at the time created the homeless task force.
at the same time they were interested in the development of a h.u.d.
obligation for each community to come up with a 10 year plan to end chronic homelessness, so a different group was developed to focus on that plan.
in 2007 those two groups came together as the ending community homelessness coalition, in 2010 at the insistence of the service providers and housing providers, we incorporated and became a freestanding 501 c 36789 the structure is that we have a 12 member community board.
that community board is made up of folks from Austin and Travis County, it does not include service providers at that level.
at the next level down we have what I call the smart people.
that's where the membership council is, that's the folks who are more active in the day to day, it's going to be the social workers, extremely pleased to have sherri flemming as the chair of our membership council this year which is going to be outstanding, so service providers and community members.
tim indicated that he's a new member, below that we have our work groups, that's really where kind of the day to day activity comes in.
the coordination of how would he going to actually carry out our count, how are we going to find the housing, encourage neighborhoods to accept housing in a safe and stable manner.
outreach.
we have a homeless management information system that -- that all of our service providers participate in.
so that we can get good data on what's working, what our numbers are, what their needs are.
you will see as you look at this issue that the needs kind of come and go.
obviously right now we're going to have an influx of more folks with veteran status.
more veteran benefits available.
so we need to know what our community of homeless individuals looks like so we can respond as a community effectively fund the resources to address their needs.
right now as you know, we've got our ad hoc committee on the 100 homeless campaign which we're very excited about and would encourage anyone, I will invite anyone who wants to come out and help us.
we will be doing the surveys, the vulnerability assessment surveys from 5:00 a.m.
to 7:00 a.m.
on November 7th, 8th, 9th, so nice early morning, any early risers, come on out and join us, we would love to have you.
Travis County has been very involved in this as -- as echo has developed a loose knit coalition of the providers, they have participated in the membership council, we have an independent review team which analyzed, which reviews and scores the applications for h.u.d.
funding, the continuum of care funding that we coordinate the application for, christie moffat participates in that.
great help from the county when it comes time to do our point in time count which h.u.d.
requires us every year to find four hours and go out and count how many homeless individuals we can find.
the folks at the jail are very helpful for those that would be on the streets but would be in jail, and lots of help from the criminal justice planning folks, darla, gay and roger jeffreys as well.
now, the scope of the problem here in Austin, Travis County is difficult to measure because -- because there's not a good, clean way to do that.
when we did our point in time count in January, we -- we counted about 2300 people, that were individuals at the time that were homeless at the time.
that means finding not folks who are in hotels temporarily, but literally folks who are in shelters, on the streets or in camps, which are throughout the city and the county.
of those, we estimate that about 800 of them were chronically homeless, they have been homeless for more than a year, they have multiple barriers to reentry, whether it be substance abuse, physical ailments, real ailments that will keep them homeless unless there's substantial intervention to get them help, 270 individuals in the county jail with but for being in the jail would have been out on the street.
>> is that assessment pretty stable over time, that about 10% of the homeless population is in the jail at any given moment.
>> the number I believe of 227 has been relative constant.
our number for our -- for our count has fluctuated.
three years ago it was the 4200 range, so I think that number stayed pretty constant.
it again is a -- it's questionable tool as I understand it, typically that can comes from they list the arch or salvation army as their address or say they're homeless so you are having to kind of pick the data that you can find there.
at the same time, aisd reported that they had 980 families that were homeless that were participating in the school system.
those folks won't be ones that we found when we did our count because families generally aren't living in the encampments or there may be some in the women and children's shelter.
if you back up and see how many individual encounters that we have in the mis each year is 6 to 8,000, over the course of the year, 6 to 8,000 folks homeless in Travis County, Austin Travis County at any given time we think there's four to five thousand.
so as I talked about what echo's role is kind of a coordination role, a planning entity, pushing very hard for permanent supportive housing and -- effective step of ending homelessness.
getting people permitly off the streets back to where they can become productive members of society.
we coordinated the h.u.d.
continuum of care, coc, $4.5 million what comes from h.u.d.
from the Austin Travis County community for homelessness services and housing projectsment really importantly only one way to grow that funding from h.u.d.
that is to score well enough that you get what they call some bonus money.
that's pen terse, so we've gotten for the last -- that's 10%, we have gotten an extra $400,000 give or take that has come in because in this area our providers have done such a good job of keeping people in housing, getting them employed coming out of housing and those are kind of the measurements, those are some of the measurements they look at in terms of scoring how we do.
that also has allowed us to get some additional grants on some pilot projects.
very pleased that salvation army got a $2 million grant to prevent veteran homelessness from the v.a.
and h.u.d., largely because Austin Travis County had scored high enough, done well enough in showing that they were successful in addressing those issues.
we talked about the point in time count.
we do homeless fairs to try to reach out and engage the homeless and -- in the services that are available.
we also coordinate the -- the homeless management information system to try to improve that system, give us more real-time data, more accurate data on what our population looks like, of course we are advocates for making sure that the community recognizes the need and knows there are things that can be done and that we can do as a community.
when echo came together, the two entities came together, we decided we needed to redo the 10 year plan because it only addressed chronic homelessness, we came out in 2010 with the plan to end community homelessness, has a spectrum from everything from prevention and how to address short term and long term homelessness and make it all work together.
unfortunately since we don't actually have funding, we didn't know how to fund all of that.
I'm not here to ask you to fund all of that today.
it's really in the community plan.
if anyone wanted to figure out what we need to do to move that forward, that would be the starting place.
let's see ...
up next you will see a photo that -- I mean a drawing that kind of shows the -- what that plan looks like in terms of how you engage folks.
get them into short term emergency shelter, transitional housing, trying to get them out into safe and stable either permanent supportive housing or -- right now we talked about the number of homeless that we have, right now we have 722 emergency shelter beds going to be at the arch, salvation army, places like that, 577 transitional housing beds, up to almost 700 permanent supportive housing beds in our community right now.
unfortunately, back in 2010, we identified that gap as needing an extra 1800 beds to get to where we really needed to serve to serve the need.
the reason we're so focused on permanent supportive housing right now, the only way to get people into emergency shelter beds which are full, the transitional beds which are full, is by moving people out of those situations into permanent supportive housing, into places they can stay as long as they abide by their lease, no time limit to get them out, move them to other locations.
the echo plan to end community homelessness as I mentioned earlier talks about prevention, trying to keep people from reaching the state of homelessness, that comes through, rental assistance, food assistance, utility assistance, do what you can to keep them in a shelter or house or apartment if they've got something.
once you've got someone who is homeless, it's critically important to get them back into housing quickly to develop more problems from happening.
I've heard it said by someone who does street outreach, I don't have the statistics, but I find this to be true if someone remains homeless for maybe 60 days, truly on the streets, if they didn't have a substance abuse problem they are going to develop one because of the situation that they are put in that people naturally reach out for something to numb the effect.
so the longer we have someone that stays homeless, the more intensive the problems come that we've got to overcome to get them back to where they can be in stable housing and employable and find a way to reengage with society.
they've gotten there because their social network fell apart.
so we have got to reestablish that social network, help them get into housing, reestablish that social network and then they can rejoin the community and save the taxpayers funds rather than the way they end up engaging the system on an emergency basis.
the long-term homelessness, that's the chronic, the ones that really need the permanent supportive housing with the intensive case management to move them through their barriers, they have we have to coordinate it.
find a way to get better and better at knowing where our openings are, what our needs are and matching up the resources that are available because in our community you typically have to -- go to the shelter and then find who has the support services because unfortunately the dollars for support services, case management, counseling, don't tend to flow together with the housing.
through the housing authorities, va, through private donations so you have to match those together, that's part of what we're trying to do more effectively.
>> [one moment please for change in captioners] housing.
>> and then we have gotten a nice grant from seton family of hospitals and from the city of huitt and all of these efforts contribute to the effort as well financially.
in terms of immediate priorities are, we hired executive director and doing outreach to make sure the level of the conversation stays at a conversation and we don't become a community where we stigmatize folks who are homeless.
that solve the problem.
we need to address with the root causes.
we are moving forward with the awareness campaign and the community housing campaign and that is something moving forward with, the city, county and echo are moving that forward over, we will move the hmis system over and we need to share the amount of data between the agencies.
frankly the jail is easy because we don't have the same privacy issues but when you start to integrate the health care providers or there is a lot of barriers to some of the family violence of the providers getting them to be allowed to share data to get a full picture of what the need is so we are making progress on that.
so I am here today to answer questions about the county continuing their involvement in a more formal manner.
as I said the folks at the criminal justice and their staff have been involved and you heard about the hundred homes campaign and you have done a great job and can help us identify for ohr count the county side of it because it is a lot easier to find folks in the city than the county.
the folks in the county don't engage in services as much because they are not as accessible.
they are in camps spread out a little more but we need to engage them as well and continue to identify them through the sheriff's office and the health providers and those that have the touches when they reach out and need help with the energy emergency e system and I ask for $50,000 to move forward.
>> I move approval of the $50,000.
>> what is that?
>> I move approval of the $50,000.
>> do you have anything.
>> yes, executive director for health human services, in anticipation of this discussion, health and human services had identified unspent resources for the 2011 fiscal year and the resources are there is a wall around them in anticipation of your consideration for this issue.
I would just like to add that this item is very timely in that you may remember that once we became an entitlement community with h.u.d., we took on certain responsibilities and we have certain expectations that we have to meet in terms of participating in our communities ending chronic homelessness and now ending community homelessness process, so our participation certainly has clearly substantial but we also must continue to demonstrate it as entitlement community with h.u.d.
also I believe your staff has a strong interest in working with echo to identify ways to better highlight the homelessness issue outside of the city of Austin.
it tends to be an issue that people identify with cities but we can assure you that there are residents who live outside of anyone's incorporated area who would also meet the definition of homelessness and we feel it is our responsibility to continue to try to highlight that point.
>> do we have any mapping with regard to aisd's -- how many families?
>> 908.
>> do we have any mapping with regard to what schools those 908 familieses are associated with?
>> I am not aware of any -- any county maps that have been generated.
we can make and ask to the child's optimal health infrastructure to see if they might.
>> and can you give us some examples of how the $50,000 will be utilized?
I know it's folded into many things that we are already doing in collaboration and I am -- I am blown away at the maturing and the collaborative effort in ending community homelessness.
I only ask -- I have seconded Commissioner Gomez's motion so I only ask as a way to highlight over what we will be doing the next year.
>> sure.
part of that is to fund staff so we can move all of these things more effectively through.
I will confess that over the last couple of years, a lot gets bogged down to the fact we are completely volunteer driven and also when we reach out for the count to survey, we find it is much more effective if you are going to come and engage someone with a small token, so, for example, hundred homes campaign, we are hoping to have a 10-dollar gift card and so we intend to have have costs like that and the costs of moving meetings forward.
there is not a single item that is a big ticket item, it is more the administrative and management pieces of moving the whole process forward.
>> and could you talk about the time line in terms of being able to access the administrative dollars you are anticipating from h.u.d.?
>> sure.
we are told that that should come part of the 2012coc project, so that would mean it would next year and be funded probably January of 2013 and what they said is that will be 3%, so that will be 3% of the 4.5 million so roughly $150,000 that would be available for administrative support, which would help us really then move this forward even more.
what we -- if you look at our plan longer term, we have an executive director but you need more than one person trying to cover the breadth of the issues because it covers everything from foster care to criminal justice to mental health to substance abuse, economic, to family violence.
it's -- what has struck me since I have been working with echo is the number of issues that are touched by homelessness or the contribute to homelessness.
so hopefully in 2012 or beginning of 23013, there will be $150,000 that will then replace this funding.
>> I am visualizing multiple faces of persons who work with other nonprofit agencies regarding this issue.
>> correct.
>> so does echo collaborate with those agencies?
>> yes, those agencies are members of echo.
they put the coalition together originally.
it will be the safe place, karatos, arch, trinity center, life works, you can kind of go -- anyone you would think of, they are active in in this organization.
>> so how will the registry be used?
>> the registry -- we will survey 8 or 900 people, we hope, and by the end of the week we will have the 100 most vulnerable, meaning those based on the survey are most likely to die on the streets if we don't find them housing and services.
the way I like to think of it is it's going to be like the american stateses man staten season of comparing campaign do every December, focus on this issue, you get community response, once you can identify by name and story and individual, not just see it in my neighborhood as we try to figure out needs of homeless woman, people who will step forward and then as a community we are able to prioritize or help our member agencies prioritize, here is where we really need to start.
what we also expect is that 100 most vulnerable will correlate heavily with being the hundred that are the most service intensive for the city and county and so we are expecting to show there will be cost savings.
if you take someone, get them into housing, it is going to be a lot less expensive for the community than if they are one of the ones -- we have 10 people who called ems more than 85 times last year.
I am sure some of that was in the er and I am sure there were probably trips to the jail.
so if we can find ways to increase that.
but at the end of the week, we will have hundred names, photos, and stories and try to broaden availability of houses and service.
>> if we have 100 units available, our goal would be to identify the 100 most vulnerable to make them available to them.
>> yes.
>> this will require a contract, right?
>> yes.
>> and that contract will be negotiated by health and human services along with the county attorney.
>> yes.
that would help to be a contract for the $50,000 with the metrics in there.
we have $4.5 million coming from h.u.d., another 2 million plus of veterans' money.
that's 6.5, a little bit more.
and either city or the county put into housing other than in kind, right?
>> yes.
you have a project that you have funded through cdbg in addition to your emergency assistance program, which helps to keep people housed and there is services through your nonprofit partners that range from keeping people housed to helping to locate housing and, you know, provide the appropriate services to support residents in that housing.
>> so is there a report that indicates where they are trying to find the local invest -- of trying to quantify the local investment and the impact that has happened?
>> there is not a good single source for that summary.
there is data pulled together by the city when they were looking at their 350 unit goal for pch in terms of what the budget spent on that and what the cost of pch is, probably the best report but it is incomplete is the one we have to turn in to h.u.d.
every year but it only track it is h.u.d.
funding.
it doesn't track everything else.
either the city is doing, county is doing or the nonprofits are doing due to private fundraising, so I am not aware of a single comprehensive report right now that talks about the total dollars.
>> I know there are -- a plan to address the need for wrap around services is anticipated.
so I guess at some point we need to know what that is so to the extent we can use available dollars for the programs and services that we provide as well as the city of Austin, we can use those dollars that have as much impact as possible.
and if we need to augment those dollars, we will know what we will get in return.
any other questions or comments?
>> I am hopeful we can use this as a way of reaching down deeper and picking up those folks who are in the most need.
maybe they haven't been able to get in contact with anybody else or they haven't been identified because they haven't come forward to ask for any assistance, but we know they are there.
so I would be looking for some information about that.
>> yes, ma'am.
>> what is that line item called about the member services?
>> it is actually in a requisition, so there is a long string of numbers that I don't have at my disposal right now that would identify the location of those dollars.
>> not the sherri fleming flesh fund?
>> [laughter]
>> all those in favor?
that passes with the funding of hhs.
>> thank you.
>> good luck.
we look forward to further collaborating with you.
>> all right.
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