Cutting edge tech + landlord outreach + no gov't infighting = keys to Bakersfield's success on homelessness
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B'field and Kern County—city and county gov'ts—eschewed scattershot and uncoordinated homelessness efforts (sound familiar?) and instead utilized multi-layered, integrated management techniques familiar to successful tech startups. Result: first big CA city to reach homelessness functional zero. Community Solutions explains.
Utilizing technology
As Bakersfield/Kern County improved their identification of people experiencing chronic homelessness, they also became more focused on engaging and housing the people on their by-name list. One improvement was fully utilizing available technology to further break down barriers, through the creation of an alert system in their Homeless Management Information System, or HMIS. The HMIS administrator would generate a daily report that outreach workers could take with them each morning to be on the lookout for those particular clients to keep them off of the “inactive” list. “So if we had somebody who we haven’t had contact with in 60 days, we would set an alert in HMIS,” said Kimmel.
Engaging Landlords
These improvement projects included holding a landlord summit in July 2018 in order to secure more housing units, along with investing in recruiting more landlords through webinars, mailing, and other conferences. While the response was not exactly as expected, the community learned that was not actually the biggest hurdle to overcome.
Case Conferencing
Improvement in the team’s case conferencing practice began in spring 2019, laying better groundwork for systems-level cooperation, communication, and change. The philosophy of the group shifted from “my client” to “our client,” and they achieved greater buy-in by switching the case conferencing facilitator from a leadership team member to a frontline staff member.
Flexible Funding
Another way they sought to lower the barriers to housing for their chronically homeless client was by leveraging flexible funds granted by Kaiser Permanente. This money allowed them to look at the unique barriers of each client on their by-name list.
This flexible funding pool covered these needs, giving case managers the autonomy to quickly solve these smaller problems, which allowed clients to move off the by-name list into permanent housing.
Read the whole thing here.
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