Bakersfield achieves functional zero on homelessness before any other big CA city
Image by David Geohring
SJ and SF city gov'ts may endlessly swirl over small-scale and scattershot homelessness solutions, but Kern County and City of Bakersfield get to "functional zero" faster than any other CA city with quick, focused, and at-scale programs that work across gov't entities. From Community Solutions.
In March of 2020, Bakersfield and Kern County joined an elite group of just five communities in the United States that have been certified for functional zero for chronic homelessness.
A community has reached functional zero for chronic homelessness when three or fewer people are experiencing chronic homelessness (or 0.1% of the community’s most recent total homelessness individual point-in-time count, whichever is greater).
By reaching functional zero, Bakersfield and Kern County have proven it’s possible to build a system of support that ensures their most vulnerable neighbors can leave homelessness behind. This does not mean that no one will ever experience homelessness again, but rather that the community has proven homelessness does not need to become inescapable or a way of life for a group of their most vulnerable neighbors.
Bakersfield reached this milestone in January 2020, reducing the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness from 62 to two people in that month, and sustaining it through March 2020.
Through a truly multi-faceted approach, the team learned to work differently and collaboratively to end chronic homelessness in their community.
As part of Built for Zero, Bakersfield changed how its homeless response system works by adopting the core elements of the Built for Zero methodology:
Building a unified regional team, or a “command center,” around a shared aim of getting to functional zero
The local Built for Zero team started by unifying the efforts of key agencies working locally to end homelessness. In many communities, local agencies or nonprofits focus on their piece of the solution, without an ability to see how all the pieces in their community fit together. Often, success is defined by each organization’s programmatic goals rather than whether the overall number of people experiencing homelessness is going down.
Bakersfield worked to reorganize their efforts around a shared goal of getting to zero on chronic homelessness. One of the key changes the team implemented was making sure everyone in each agency was using the same definition of “chronic homelessness.” The team realized there was no system-wide definition being used and discovered that working with a shared definition resulted in better housing outcomes for their clients.
As Deb Johnson, President of California Veterans Assistance Foundation explained, “When we all were on the same page and it made more sense, then it felt like we were on a significant roll at that point.” Operationalizing this newly shared definition was the next step in uniting the various agencies. “It was about just streamlining the processes to put people in the right vulnerability category so that the proper work and interventions could happen for them at the proper time,“ said Kimmel.
Read the whole thing here.
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