Latest news with #CoordinatedEntry
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘We stay on top of it.' New Pierce County homeless shelter hub showing success
Less than a year since coming on line, Pierce County's homeless shelter intake hub has helped more than 1,400 individuals find shelter. Last summer, it was announced that Family Promise of Pierce County would receive a $1 million grant from the county to create the county's first-ever homeless shelter access hub. With that funding, the organization leased a portion of an unused school building in Parkland to serve as a centralized intake hub for anyone experiencing homelessness in Pierce County to receive help finding shelter. While the shelter intake hub did not reach full operating capacity until November 2024, Family Promise of Pierce County told The News Tribune staff had helped refer 1,452 individuals experiencing homelessness into shelter as of May 20, 2025. Before Family Promise and the shelter intake hub, the only hotline available to families and individuals experiencing homelessness was the county's 211 line — which could only be used between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. Family Promise now operates a 24/7 hotline for any individual or family experiencing or at risk of homelessness. During the Pierce County Council's Health and Human Services Committee meeting on May 20, Family Promise of Pierce County CEO Steve Decker reported the organization's progress. 'People can go to they can call us, they can text us, they can show up in-person with an appointment, and we can do the intake in 15 different languages and connect them to emergency resources,' Decker told committee members about the organization's efforts to reduce barriers. He said the intake process can be as short as answering seven questions. 'Which means it is not a big barrier to get people's information enough to contact them and connect them to services,' he told the committee. Alternatively, Decker said, the organization has a longer intake process for more involved case management that uses over 240 points of data for individuals and families. In his presentation, Decker reported the shelter intake hub places an average of 121 individuals or families into shelter each month. The hub receives thousands of calls and text each month from people in crisis. Decker said a large part of Family Promise's success has been achieved through diligent and consistent communication with clients. Past intake programs funded by the county, such as Coordinated Entry, have been criticized by some left wondering when they will be contacted for follow-up. 'In our contract with the county, the requirement was that we return people's contact within 24 hours from initial contact,' Decker told the Health and Human Services Committee. 'I tell my staff that they only have an hour.' He reported to the committee Family Promise averages about a 10-minute follow-up time from when someone texts, fills out an intake online or calls. 'We stay on top of it,' Decker said. 'We want someone who is in crisis to know that someone is paying attention to them. Even if they are a family and we have to tell them that there is no [shelter] availability.' Decker said his organization has identified a number of barriers to getting families and individuals experiencing homelessness into shelter. The number one barrier is strict shelter requirements. He said strict requirements could be anything from requiring someone to pass a drug test to requiring that someone does not have certain prior criminal offenses while other offenses are allowable. Some shelters, such as non-congregate shelters, will not allow children with or without an adult. Duke Paulson is the executive director of the Tacoma Rescue Mission — one of the largest operators of shelter in Pierce County. The organization also operates the largest family shelter in the county. Paulson previously told The News Tribune shelters that serve youth and families are required to implement stricter screening processes than for low-barrier shelters, in some cases limiting the options for families seeking shelter. Family Promise of Pierce County has been involved in Pierce County's homelessness response for a little over a year. Its model has been to focus on unhoused families with children, utilizing AI and diligent case management to cut through bureaucratic barriers. According to data reported by Family Promise, families they have helped into shelter spent an average of 26 days in emergency shelter. 'That is fast,' Decker told the committee. Of the 145 families the organization has helped into stable housing since the organization began operations near the beginning of 2024, only four have done so with subsidized housing vouchers. Meaning, 141 of those families were able to find and pay for housing on their own. 'That's the model.' Decker told the committee. 'We shouldn't have people depend on [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] or the lottery systems to get off the street.'
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The death of 2 homeless children in frigid Detroit raises questions about a flawed system in peril
Tateona Williams called the city of Detroit in November for help finding shelter for her family after learning their living arrangement with a relative was no longer working out. But Williams never reached a resolution with the homeless response team, and no one followed up, even after the city opened a new drop-in shelter for families just a few weeks later, its mayor said. This week, two of Williams' children — ages 2 and 9 — were found dead of apparent hypothermia in a van the family had been sleeping in for at least two months, Interim Police Chief Todd Bettison said. Temperatures dropped below freezing Monday, when Williams had parked on the ninth floor of a casino parking garage. Starting months prior, Williams had 'asked everybody for help' for her family. 'I called out of state, I called cities I didn't know, I called cities people asked me to call. I even asked Detroit — I've been on CAM list for the longest,' Williams told CNN affiliate WXYZ, referring to the Coordinated Entry system unhoused people are urged to contact in and near Detroit. 'Everybody now wants to help after I lost two kids?' The tragedy has the city of Detroit reevaluating how it connects homeless families with shelters, highlighting what national advocates say are broken systems – mostly the responsibility of state and local officials – for helping people experiencing homelessness. It's also exacerbating fears of what could happen if federal support for people in or on the precipice of homelessness wanes as the fledgling Republican administration of President Donald Trump pushes to slash spending by cutting critical benefits programs that serve the neediest Americans and eliminating key agencies. Many US cities already don't have enough resources or aren't deploying them most effectively to meet the needs of their homeless residents, said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. Public officials, meanwhile, have not done enough to address the root causes of homelessness, he said, among them: a shortage of affordable, low-income housing units; landlords driving up rent prices; and a federal minimum wage that stands at $7.25. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development – which supports construction of affordable housing, provides rental assistance to millions, enforces the Fair Housing Act and offers grants to help people experiencing homelessness – in recent weeks has 'identified over $260 million in savings,' Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement this week without elaborating on the type of savings. 'HUD will be detailed and deliberate about every dollar spent to serve rural, tribal and urban communities,' he said. CNN has reached out to the agency for further comment. If the Trump administration makes cuts to HUD, it would be 'outright wrong,' said Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. 'And we know what the result of that is going to be,' he said. 'It's going to be more people living on the street, more people dying on the street.' The death of Williams' children in Detroit points to a growing national homelessness crisis impacting more families every year, advocates say. An estimated 770,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2024 – a record high that marked an 18% increase from 2023 – HUD reported. Of those, 64% stayed at shelters and 36% were unsheltered in places not designed for human habitation. One-third of them were in families of at least one adult and one child, the annual survey found, as the number of families with kids experiencing homelessness rose by 39%. At the same time, the country has a shortage of 7.3 million homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. And America faces a housing conundrum: Mortgage rates aren't falling and home prices are expected to keep rising as Trump, a billionaire property developer, has launched new tariffs and mass deportations that could boost the cost of materials and labor. HUD initiatives like the Section 8 voucher program, which helps low-income families lease affordable privately owned rental housing, are already underfunded and have waiting lists, Berg said. 'We need to get people housing … and other services to be stable in the housing,' he said. 'None of those are at scale.' For those in need of emergency shelter, some cities lack enough beds, with those in need often put on waiting lists when they have nowhere else to go, Berg said. Other cities have plenty of shelter space but not enough resources to staff hotlines at all hours, Whitehead said, perhaps only answering the phones from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 'People run into crises 24 hours a day,' he said. Further, some unhoused people fear being criminalized if they call police directly for help, Whitehead said. Some cities prohibit people from sleeping in their cars in public places, with jail time or fines threatened, he said. One California city this week voted to criminalize 'aiding' and 'abetting' homeless camps, an unusual move advocates say could stifle help for people who need it. Many shelters also cater to single adults more than families with children, Whitehead said, noting: 'The system was not really designed for families.' The children's deaths in Detroit have 'gotta make us rethink everything that we're doing,' Mayor Mike Duggan, a Democrat, said during a news conference this week. 'It brings home the point that having services available doesn't mean very much if the residents who need them don't know how to access them.' Detroit opened a family drop-in center December 16 to provide shelter for residents just in time for the cold winter months, he said. And residents can call police for help if they face a crisis after 6 p.m. But the city also must give clear options to people when they call about shelters, the mayor said. He also wants a policy that requires outreach workers to do a site visit any time a family with children calls the city for help. 'I want that outreach worker face-to-face to identify what the situation is and make sure it is resolved,' Duggan said. For now, a police investigation and an administrative review of the circumstances that led to Williams' children's deaths are underway, Detroit spokesman John Roach told CNN. The case, Whitehead said, also should raise awareness of the hurdles people across the country experience when they become homeless – and what's at stake if the resources available to help them aren't enough. 'We have to continue to ensure that our elected officials understand that we are not talking about statistics, we are talking about people,' he said. 'And in the richest country in the history of the world, no one should lose their life because they have a lack of resources to protect them from the elements.'
