Enclosure_2_-_2022_SMC_CoC_Strategic_Plan.pdf

Enclosure 2 - 2022 San Mateo County Continuum of Care Strategic Plan on Homelessness

The San Mateo County (SMC) Continuum of Care (CoC) Strategic Plan on Homelessness can be downloaded here: San Mateo County Continuum of Care Strategic Plan on Homelessness). The Strategic Plan can also be accessed online: https://www.smcgov.org/hsa/center-homelessness.

The six goals and strategies for achieving them are provided below:

Goal 1: Engage and support people who are unsheltered to transition to interim housing, permanent housing, or other places where they can access needed services and supports.

• Continue existing street outreach programs and implement targeted expansions to further cover County geography, offer services after hours and on weekends, and deepen connections and collaborations with health and behavioral health services.

• Refine and fine-tune connections between street outreach programs and Coordinated Entry access points to streamline access into services for people who are unsheltered.

• Enhance data collection by outreach teams to increase understanding of numbers and characteristics of people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

• Expand emergency shelter bed inventory for adult-only households. Continuously analyze data to ensure inventory of shelter for adults is right-sized.

• Maintain inventory of emergency shelter and transitional housing beds for families, youth, and domestic violence survivors. Continue analyzing data to ensure inventory of shelter for these populations is right-sized.

• Offer a range of shelter options and models, including both congregate and non-congregate settings.

• Continue and enhance Housing First approaches in emergency shelter and interim housing programs – including low barriers to entry, 24/7 operations, voluntary service participation, and housing-focused services and supports.

• Scale up existing programs and create new programs providing nimble, intensive, wrap-around service for highly vulnerable unsheltered people who have multi-system involvement and/or are ineligible for some shelter or interim housing programs.

Goal 2: Permanently house people experiencing homelessness by increasing the capacity of the homeless crisis response system to provide housing solutions.

• Prioritize developing new housing units targeted to people who are experiencing homelessness and/or who are Extremely Low Income (incomes at or below 30% of Area Median Income).

Leverage the County’s Affordable Housing Fund (which consists of a combination of local sources like Measure A/K and State sources managed locally like Housing for a Healthy California (HHC), Mental Health Services Act (MHSA), No Place Like Home (NPLH), and Permanent Local Housing Allocation (PLHA) to continually add new units targeted to extremely low-income (ELI) households and people experiencing homelessness.

Secure funding to acquire and rehabilitate motels for permanent supportive housing though future Project Homekey rounds.

Use the Housing Authority’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) project-basing authority to incentivize development of new units for people experiencing homelessness.

Explore creation of new Local Operating Subsidy (LOSP) program to provide a local source of subsidy for deeply affordable units.

Explore innovative construction methods and models such as modular units.

Identify sources to develop housing for specific populations impacted by homelessness – particularly older adults who need medical and behavioral health support.

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• Maintain and expand permanent housing voucher programs for people experiencing homelessness, e.g., Continuum of Care (CoC)-funded Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV), Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (VASH), Family Unification Program (FUP), Mainstream Vouchers. Introduce more flexibility to transition people to different levels of support or phase out support as appropriate. Create voucher programs with simplified eligibility criteria and process (e.g., EHV).

• Analyze the need for Rapid Rehousing (RRH) slots and continue adding to the system inventory as needed. Identify strategies to stabilize RRH households that need additional support (e.g., with longer subsidies, options to transfer to permanent supportive housing).

• Evaluate Coordinated Entry (CE) policies and tools for matching people to permanent supportive housing and rapid rehousing to identify whether the matching process is functioning as intended and revise as needed.

• Assess need for housing search services and scale up as needed to serve more households that need support with identifying units, completing housing applications, and negotiating with property owners. Explore dedicated housing search services for special populations such as domestic violence (DV) survivors and veterans.

Continue and enhance Housing First approaches in permanent housing programs – including low barriers to entry, voluntary service participation, and housing-focused services and supports.

Identify innovative housing solutions for populations that have the greatest barriers to housing – people with complex health needs, older adults, people with criminal histories, and people who are undocumented.

Leverage California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (Cal-AIM) resources to provide housing supports.

Strengthen partnerships with programs providing employment and training services for experiencing homelessness who have significant employment barriers, such as NOVA/Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) programs. Connect eligible households to income supports such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

Deepen connections between health services and homeless crisis response system to expand housing access and support housing retention.

Goal 3: Prevent people from experiencing homelessness through early intervention, stabilization services, and financial assistance for households with housing instability.

• Refine strategies to prevent discharge from institutions to homelessness, including diversion services for people exiting jails and hospitals.

• Partner with school districts to identify families at risk of homelessness and ensure they are connected to available prevention services.

• Provide the right level of case management and clinical services, matched to what participants need, for people who are housed – particularly people who are chronically homeless who have recently secured housing (to prevent returns to homelessness).

• Maintain system capacity to provide emergency financial assistance to help households maintain their housing.

• Explore strategies around using data to target prevention assistance to households most likely to experience an episode of homelessness.

Goal 4: Advance equity by identifying and addressing disparities in who experiences homelessness, who accesses the homeless crisis response system, their experiences with the system, and the outcomes of the system.

• Convene quarterly meetings of CoC Racial Equity Committee to guide development and implementation of strategies to advance equity, including:

Qualitative data gathering (e.g., interviews, focus groups, etc.) to identify and understand causes of racial and other disparities in the system.

Developing and releasing regular data reports.

Providing training and technical assistance to homeless crisis response system providers.

Increasing representation of those with lived experience in CoC and agency leadership.

Goal 5: Listen and respond to the voices of people with lived experience of homelessness to enhance person-centered approaches in the homelessness response system.

• Create regular, ongoing processes for gathering input from people experiencing homelessness and involving them in decision-making on homeless crisis response system implementation (e.g., focus groups, surveys, a lived experience advisory group), including staff working within the system who have had experiences of homelessness.

• Assess and identify how to streamline access processes for services, treatment, and shelter so that people can more immediately access the services and supports they need when they are ready to reach out for help.

• Enhance “customer service” orientation throughout the system.

• Build partnerships, collaboration, and communication between providers and across systems to provide more nimble, responsive, and coordinated assistance for people who are experiencing homelessness.

• Scale up training programs for agency staff to build capacity to deliver trauma-informed, client centered services.

• Review existing grievance processes.

• Find ways to measure quality of engagement, not just number of contacts that service providers have with people experiencing homelessness.

Goal 6: Use data for continuous quality improvement and service coordination.

• Continue using Homeless Management Information System (HMIS)/Clarity and other systems to gather and analyze data to understand what the homeless crisis response system is accomplishing, identify areas in need of continued improvement, and make decisions regarding funding of various program types.

• Expand capacity of data systems to provide real time information at the client level to support service coordination between service providers and across systems.