By Stefania Lugli / The Journal
Service providers and housing officials gathered Thursday to launch their first day of a their functional zero campaign, an effort to ensure that there are more people staying housed across the state than falling into homelessness.
Planning bodies for each region, called continuums of care, participated in a homelessness summit in Topeka to mark Kansas becoming a Built for Zero state. The zero each region will be pursuing is functional zero, a milestone used to gauge how well a community is dealing with homelessness.
The measure was created by Community Solutions, a national nonprofit that works with communities to evaluate whether they have “measurably solved” homelessness for a specific population, such as veterans or the chronically homeless.
Functional zero does not mean there are no homeless people in a community. As The Journal previously reported, functional zero is a tool for communities to build their capacity in keeping homelessness rare and brief, leaning on quality data to create metrics and track interventions.
Last week, teams worked on six-month action plans and learned more about the quality data standards necessitated by Community Solutions. Each team gets an assessment of the comprehensiveness of their system and works to improve their score by the end of their six-month plan, according to Erin Healy, the strategy lead for large scale change Community Solutions, who was coaching at the day’s workshops.
There are five continuums in Kansas: Wichita/Sedgwick County, Topeka/Shawnee County, Johnson County, Wyandotte County and the Balance of State, which is divided up into eight regions covering the rest of the state.
Every continuum has the same benchmark to hit first: getting certified, quality data. According to a questionnaire Community Solutions provided Kansan providers, achieving such data includes: coordinating consistent street and shelter outreach with other providers, creating a unique identifier for each individual added to prevent duplication, establishing timelines for data submission and ongoing quality assurance, reporting race and ethnicity and including statuses of whether a person is homeless, housed or inactive.
After that, regions decide what improvements to pursue, like reducing the number of days it takes to get someone from identification to housed.
“Part of the myth is if people see visible homeless people, they think nothing is happening around homelessness, and that’s just not true,” Healy said. “If they want those folks who are living in the parks to have different options, they should get involved and understand what the solution is.”
Housing is part of the solution, but providers often run into tensions among neighborhoods that oppose low-income, supportive or emergency housing.
“That’s a challenge. It’s a bit of a rock and a hard place. Built for Zero is a way of working collaboratively – it’s not going to end homelessness overnight. You still have to deal with those structural issues,” Healy said. “I would ask people to educate themselves. It’s not necessarily about the fault of the individual versus the fault of the system.”
Kansas is part of a small cohort of states wholly committed to Built for Zero, joining Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland and Washington in the journey towards functional zero.
Last summer, the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition released the state’s annual Point-in-Time numbers, counting 2,815 homeless Kansans. Service providers and organizers believe this number to be higher, as the PIT only conducts a count once every January. Community Solution’s push for real-time, comprehensive data can give the local continuum of cares a more accurate picture of the prevalence of homelessness. Better data means more research to support different housing and homelessness initiatives, like funding supportive housing or homeless shelters.
Wichita first to hit a functional zero benchmark in Kansas
Wichita/Sedgwick County has already achieved quality by-name data for homeless veterans, according to Matt Lowe, the community impact manager at The United Way of the Plains and member of the Sedgwick County Coalition to End Homelessness.
Lowe said that to hit that milestone, the coalition had to rewrite many policies as well as develop new ways of organizing data under high scrutiny. One new method was creating a process for people who don’t consent to share data with the Homeless Management Information System.
“Our next benchmark is to reach functional zero for veterans,” Lowe said. “However, Community Solutions also measures what they call shifts, which tracks significant reductions. … Because this is such a system overhaul and change, it is taking longer than we would like but I think that we are on the right track.”
As of April 28, there are 37 homeless veterans in the Coalition’s system. The goal is to reach functional zero for veterans by the end of November.
The other continuums are working towards Community Solutions’ suggested first benchmark: achieving quality data for at least one sub-population.
Douglas County and southeast counties – both Balance of State regions – are the “test cases” for the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition, as those areas are further along in their functional zero track, according to Christy McMurphy, the executive director of the coalition.
“My hope for the next six months is that all teams are on their way to achieve quality data,” she said. “While others will have reached that milestone and are on their way to reach functional zero for the population they selected for the action cycle.”
This article was republished here with the permission of: KLC Journal