Detroit Continuum of Care — Board of Directors, 7.7.2025

8:57PM Jul 7, 2025

Speakers:

Keywords:

COC project review

2025 NOFO

reallocation policy

housing sustainability

client sustainability

performance metrics

coordinated entry

street outreach

transitional housing

domestic violence

housing planning tool

dynamic prioritization

proportional allocation

client resource materials

acuity groups.

Homelessness

Coordination

Communication

Housing Providers

Youth Homelessness

YHDP

Youth Action Council

Subrecipients

System Effectiveness

Leadership

Evaluation

Community Planning

Funding

Stakeholder Engagement

Service Provision.

Community, and as previously said, I'm going to put results in the chat once I sort them out. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Chelsea, and thank you for everyone who voted, and we will jump right into our agenda now, so we will be looking at our tier one priorities,

and Amanda Sternberg from hand will be presenting on our 2025, COC project review criteria, and I'm going to turn it over to you. Amanda,

thank you. Get my screen shared here.

You could please keep yourself on mute.

Can you mute? It looks like Julia, yep. Thank you. All right, thanks.

Feel free to drop questions or anything in the chat as I go along, or, you know, raise your hand and we'll take the questions that way. So thank you everyone for being here. I'm Amanda Sternberg, performance management analyst with hand, and I'm going to be going over some recommendations that were sent to the COC board in the board packet prior to this meeting. So hopefully you have board members have had a chance to review them. Ultimately, there are two items that the board is going to be asked to vote on. These are going to be two separate voting items, so there'll be two different links for them, but just to let you know where we're going, the first the board is going to be asked to vote to approve the 2025 renewal valuation and scoring criteria, and also the 2025 recommended reallocation and appeals policy. First, though, I want to set the stage and do a bit of a kind of backup, just real quick, to the June board meeting. The plan that kind of what we're going to be talking about here was initially approved by the COC board in June as a way for us to move forward with the project review process for this year in light of what was known and not known at that time, back in June. So just as a kind of a quick reminders, this is some of the stuff that we talked about at our June board meeting, just going through the knowns and unknowns as of June. Some of this information has changed as of last week, Thursday, but we'll get to that in a moment. So just to start with, when we last met and talked about this in June, some of the things that we presumed as it relates to the COC competition this year was that there would be no new COC bonus or domestic violence bonus funding, that reallocation would be the only way to fund new projects. What we did not know was what decisions the COC may need to make if there was any reduction in funding. We did not know if HUD would release a 2025, Notice of Funding Opportunity or NOFO. But what we did know, and kind of what we rested on, was knowing that there was still a regulatory obligation for CoCs to monitor and evaluate project performance. So since last week, there's a little bit of information, additional information that has come out as we go along, though you'll see there's not going to be a lot of changes in the recommendations even with this new information. So what we do now know that you know the changes that or new information that has come to light, has to do with new project funding that presumably will be available and the release of a revised NOFO. So on June 3, excuse me, July 3. So last week, Thursday, HUD sent out an email indicating that they intend to publish an FY 2025 Notice of Funding Opportunity or no vote, and that there will be a 2025 competition. So this is new, and this is different from what we had been working with. Some of the assumption based on the 2024 no vote, which was essentially a two year NOFO, that unless there was new information, that there would not be a national competition this year, and that there would not be new funding, while the communication from HUD last week indicates differently, and indicates that there will be a 2025 NOFO and a 2025 competition. In HUD's communication of last week, they also indicated, I have it quoted there, that there will. Will be opportunities to fund new types of projects, including street outreach and transitional housing programs. So this is all that we know at this point. We do not have any additional details on Timing on when applications may be due. We don't know anything about the amount of funding that's available, either for renewals or for new projects. Nor do we know any additional details on these types of new projects that HUD seems to be making funding available for. So while there is a little bit of information that has been provided, it's not much. All that we do know at this point is that it sounds like there will be a NOFO released this year, there will be a competition, and there will be some opportunity for some type of new funding to be applied for, however, because there is still a lot of unknowns, and we are still anticipating things to look quite different In this coming NOFO than they have in the past. We are really recommending that we continue to move forward with the current plan for reviewing renewal projects, just given kind of the work that we already have underway. And so yeah, so in terms of the recommendations themselves that you're going to see, they're no different than what was sent out in the board packet. So I just wanted, though, to let the board know that, you know, you received that packet kind of before the July 4 holiday, and then right before the July 4 holiday, we've got this information from HUD, but the recommendations themselves have not changed. So again, to continue to sort of set the stage on these recommendations, and we talked about this a bit again at our June board meeting, but just in response to those things that we presume, the things that we know or that we don't know, we are planning to do a data focused evaluation of all of our currently funded Continuum of Care projects that will look back over calendar year 2024, and how they perform over the course of that year. Every agency would receive a scorecard, as they typically do, which would detail their project performance and what score that they earned. So again, it's recommended that we still move forward with this plan, given you know additional details about the 2025 competition are still unknown, and that we do want to note that when additional information is provided by HUD, we will certainly revisit our plan to see if there's additional if there's different changes we need to make, or other different direction that we need to go in. I will note that the recommended renewal project review criteria is focused on data driven elements that include measures related to increasing client sustainability, such as increasing income and employment and housing outcomes. Housing sustainability and those are all aligned with system performance measures, so we really are kind of keeping the course and having a data driven and data focused review that focuses on some of those elements related to client sustainability, whether that be housing sustainability or helping them to increase income and employment. So the purpose, again, of this project review that we are planning to carry through, it will provide all of our COC funded projects with a scorecard to let them know how they perform and how they sport, and kind of let them know where they're at with their performance. It will identify areas of strong performance and areas for improvement, both within individual projects and within our system overall. And it will also provide us for data that we may need, that may be useful as we look ahead to even next year's competition, the 2026 competition. And lastly, it can provide us performance data that could be used if needed, to inform a project priority ranking list. So again, at the time we talked about this last month, we have framed this as we don't know if we're going to have to even rank projects this year. It is looking likely, given that there will be a NOFO released, and there will be a competition, I anticipate that that means we will have to do a project ranking list again this year. Again. That's a bit the details of that are unknown, and we really won't know further details until HUD does release Regardless, this review process that we're going to be doing will provide us with information that we'll need to inform that ranking process.

We talked about this tentative timeline. As well at our June meeting. And this was initially put together to demonstrate the timeline and some of the time constraints that we were under. And you'll see that this timeline really only included three months, with the month of July being really where we are doing this. Project review process. Agencies are getting their scores. And as we move into August, at that time, the plan was, if projects had to be ranked, that those decisions would be made in August, and then again, that if projects had to be entered into E snaps, which is the online application portal, that that likewise would happen in August. At that time, August is the only deadline that we had to work with that had been previously communicated by HUD last year. So right now, where we are at August is a lot of question marks. As of today, we don't know any other deadline other than that previously communicated August deadline. However, again, given the fact that we know the NOFO is going to be released, and it looks like there will be a competition, I would anticipate that August is that August deadline is going to change, but what is going to change too we don't know, so we are very much just going to continue to move forward until we have additional information that will better clarify the timeline that we're under, but just knowing that the initial ideas on what we thought August was going to look like may change. Okay, so that was a lot of background. I just wanted to again, set the stage on the prior conversation that we had had, and bring in some of that new information that we just learned last week. So I want to dive in now to the actual recommendations on the evaluation criteria. And again, the details to this did go out in the board packet previously, but some of the couple of the aims of the recommendations, the first is really, for the most part, we are looking to keep this evaluation and scoring criteria the same as in prior years, and I referenced this before, but really the focus is on using those data driven evaluation and scoring criteria. So what that means is that some narrative responses that we have used in the past are being put on hold for this year, and instead focusing focusing on those data elements, which is largely data that is going to be coming from HMIs. So the way that these evaluation criteria were developed, first hand staff did a review of the data. We looked at the average performance over when in last year's competition, which looked back on calendar year 2023 we looked at some preliminary data for calendar year 2024 and just to get get a general sense of where our projects are performing on these various measures. Ultimately, these recommended criteria were approved by the CoCs funding and performance committee as a reminder, this is a new committee that was established with the passage of the governance charter last year. Committee is sort of in a transition phase, but the recommendations were approved by that committee. The time period that these criteria look at is over the past calendar year. So we're looking back over 2024 and even though I'm just really going to be going over some high level information here for the board meeting in your board packet, you did get access to really the full evaluation criteria, including all of the details on the metrics, the supporting scales, the point values and all of that that was available in your work packet. And certainly that level of detail will be provided to the agencies as well. So I want to start with the modified criteria. So there is one evaluation criteria that's being modified from last year, and this is really adding some clarification to this criteria. This is a criteria that would apply to all project types, and it is looking at their it's a criteria that would reduce points from a project score rather than gaining points, and it's the area in which a project could have points reduced from its score if there were outstanding or unresolved audit or monitoring findings in it. Either it's agency's financial audit, it's a 133 audit monitoring findings from the city of Detroit for homeless programs or from HUD for their continuum of care programs. So one thing that we clarified was that there's kind of five different criteria under which a project could lose points in the prior. Language has said that up to two points for each of those criteria could be deducted from the score. We simplified that and clarified that just to say two points would be deducted, rather than up to two points. Just to make it clearer, I guess, we also clarified that points would be deducted for repeat audit findings, and this is has to do with the agency's financial audit or their a 133 audits, clarify that points would be deducted for repeat findings rather than repeat or unresolved findings. And we clarified that language because there can be instances where an agency may submit an audit to us, and they may still be in the process of resolving those findings, and it really won't be until the following audit year when we'll know if they have been resolved or not. So again, we simplified and tried to clarify that language, and lastly, we did add language to the application materials that says that continuous, significant, repeat audit or monitoring findings with no resolutions will be taken into further consideration. And so that statement was left intentionally left a bit broad to provide some room for additional discussion or just additional decision making. If any you know, audit or monitoring findings seem to warrant that type of discussion. So there was only one modified criteria, and this is the one criteria that was modified, and you can see the modification was really intended to provide some clarification to kind of how negative points would be assigned. There was only so there were two new criteria that were added this year. And these new criteria would apply to the Coordinated Entry supportive services only grant or the SSO grant that is held by hand as the cam lead agency. So these, again, are two new criteria added for that grant. So the first criteria is adding an evaluation criteria regarding the accuracy of submission of Housing Choice Voucher applications into mischief portal that is a task and a responsibility that is given to what mister Calls the Heart. That's a kind of another term for the cam lead. The last time we implemented that as an evaluation criteria for this grant was several years ago, when southwest still filled the role as the cam lead, or the Hara. So now that hand has taken over that role, and we've been in this role for a bit, Mister has again started to monitor hand in their again in this role, within this task that we are expected to complete. And so the recommendation is that we we reincorporate this as an evaluation criteria, as a means to hold hand accountable for this role that they are expected to play

as the Hara. The second new evaluation criteria, again applied to the Coordinated Entry grant that hand holds, is to incorporate proportional points from the 2024 COC application. I'll go into this in some detail, but I will note that what is being recommended here is the same type of you could say, the same type of logic or the same type of evaluation criteria that is done for the HMIs grant that hand receives directly. No changes are being made to that evaluation criteria. Just wanted to point out that kind of what we're recommending here is in alignment with our current practice as well with the direct HMIs grant. So what this would look at in the 2024 competition. So last year's COC competition, there were a series of questions that we had to answer about our coordinated entry process, about how people are assessed, how they access coordinated entry, our prioritization process, who are the various entities involved? Just a lot of different questions that had to be responded to HUD then, as I do with all of our questions in the application, reviewed and scored those responses and gave us a score. So the recommendation here is that we take the basically the percentage of points that we earned on those questions in the COC application, and apply that percentage to the number of points that this would be worth in our local application. So in the 2024 application to HUD, we did earn all of the points possible for this element. So essentially, what this would take is that. Percentage, 100% and apply that to the point value of this evaluation criteria in our local process. So this recommendation is being made really in absence of other previously established evaluation criteria that we could look back on, and I will note that we're going to be hearing later today from Cindy crane, who has just gone through the evaluation of our coordinated entry system, which I think is going to set a really, probably great groundwork for kind of future local application processes to have local goals or benchmarks to work towards. But keep in mind that for this evaluation criteria that we're talking about now, we're looking back on what happened last year, so that's we sort of find ourselves in that kind of awkward space of looking back on something and wanting to be able to apply some evaluation criteria to what happened last year. So I'm going to really also kind of go through the things that are not changing. So again, we really had only three changes without one modified criteria, the two new criteria for the coordinated industry grants for our other projects, our permanent supportive housing, Rapid Rehousing projects. There in our joint component, th RRH, domestic violence projects, there are really no changes being recommended. So measures related to income and employment are staying the same. Housing quality and performance measures would be the same, measuring and evaluating on financial performance, meaning how much of the prior grant has been expended. Is staying the same. Measures related to HMIs compliance, coordinated industry compliance, compliance with having a person with lived experience of homelessness on the board or company body are all staying the same. Likewise, there are also specific criteria for the Coordinated Entry grant that is held by CHS, which is one of our implementing partners for cam. And again, I've also referenced the direct grant that hand receives for HMIs. No changes are being recommend. Are being recommended there. So again, by and large, recommending that everything stays the same. There are some scored criteria that we have used in the past that again for this year, we are recommending be not included, but we will include language in the application materials that applicants should know they may be reincorporated in future competitions. So these are largely narrative responses that, again, given the timeframe that we had been working under, that we recommend just be put on pause for this year. So those are a couple of questions that had applied to PSH only around service staff availability and how they track referrals. For all projects, there were some narrative responses around how they incorporated people with lived experience into their programming and in their staffing structures. And for domestic violence only projects, there was a narrative response on how the project increased the safety of persons served. And then lastly, there was in the past the last year, there was a criteria, score, criteria for points for participation in the unsheltered Point in Time Count, which was not held in 2025 so that would would not come back around until 2026 so before I go on and talk a little bit specifically about why HDPE, I just want to pause to see if there's any questions. I know I did cover a lot of material right there.

Yes, Jane,

thank you for your presentation. Amanda, correct me if I was street outreach

an allowable

expense, historically,

I believe for referencing kind of the language from HUD around in the coming 2025 NOFO around, yes, so yes, in a way, you may recall, for those of you who are around in 2022 You may recall that we had what was called the snowfo, or the supplemental Yeah, yep, yep, yep. And in that application, we were able to apply for street outreach programs as an supportive services only project, an SSO project, which SSOs, in and of themselves, according to regulations, are an allowable cost. It has just been many years since HUD has. Have allowed any applications for new SSO funding. All right, yeah, so yes,

thank you. Yep.

Okay, I want to take a moment so these recommendations again would apply the recommendation I just went through would really apply to our primarily applied to our non yhgp projects. And yhgp is the youth homelessness demonstration program projects. There is sort of additional recommendations regarding our yhgp projects in particular, and there's kind of a three poll recommendations. Let me run through these so and again in your board packet. I did give some additional context to all of this as well. But we do recommend for our YG BP projects that they do be considered for funding for their 2627 grant terms, which is the grant terms that we're talking about here, even though there are areas of performance that they did struggle in. The rationale for this recommendation is that, over the course of 2024 why HDP was still very much in the ramp up phase of getting their programming off the ground, it was a new type of programming. There was a lot of things that had to be learned about how these projects would function. And hand, I will say hand, as the direct recipient of yhtp, is looking at these projects very closely, and there are already discussions on when or if or where some corrective action may be needed with some of the sub recipients. Also, there is further work that is underway to better scope out performance metrics and an evaluation plan for these projects, again taking into consideration some of the unique aspects of yhgp. So with this recommendation, ysgp projects would still receive a scorecard on what their performance was and what their score would have been if they based on kind of this standard evaluation criteria that we just went over. And I will also note that sort of this third point does relate specifically to hand as the direct recipient of these grants, that if hand is not able to demonstrate an improvement in its spending on these YCP projects by midway through the current grant terms, that we may need to look at placing hand on a corrective action plan to more closely monitor the spending. And I do acknowledge the awkwardness of me stating that being an employee of hand, but just wanted to point out that we do want to continue to hold hand accountable for these direct grants that we do receive as the direct recipient, and while again, there are internal conversations underway and internal plans to improve those spending rates and improve their performance. Rates being placed on a corrective action plan is never out of the question, all right, before we move into the vote, any other questions that I can

help to answer i

Yes. Tara,

hey, Amanda, okay, so I totally get that you don't have the answer to this, so that's gonna say that

right now. I'll do my best. Okay, so I gave having

to vote on this, right? Like, kind of having to, like, zoom right, that these are going to be the things that we're going to need, but we're voting on this now. Let's say more information comes out in August or September that says, hey, you need to incorporate X, Y and Z in order to be competitive in the applications. Will you, you know, values and funding, whatever it's called. Now, like, come back and say, Okay, here's what we voted on, what you guys approved. However, in order to be most competitive, we need to make X, Y and Z adjustments,

yes, okay, yep. And

I will note too that that is not entirely atypical of our process. So we do, typically, not, typically always, kick off our local application and review process like in the spring, months ahead of when HUD releases. HUD typically releases the NOFO in June or July. And we do typically kick off our local review process April, May so and we do, you know, include information within there that if upon release of the NOFO, there's additional details that cause us to have to revisit all of this, we will do. That. So in a way, this is not, on the one hand, it's not different from how it's been in the past, and that we are rolling things out and taking things off ahead of the notebook. What is different is that we were not expect, really expecting. I don't want to say we weren't expecting a no vote. There were in claims that something was going to happen. I think we were hoping it wouldn't, but that is probably the difference, and the difference that this year's NOFO will likely look very different than it has in the past.

Yes, Tara, one more question. So the whole like two year grant cycle for renewal projects. Do we have any idea that is completely done away with and this NOFO cycle might just be for, like, transitional street outreach? Or do we think like it's going to be

so? So I want to clarify that HUD never I know the word we use, the phrase two year grant cycle. Projects never received a two year grant agreement. Projects only. So the grant agreements that have just come out now from last year's application process were only for 12 months. So it was always understood that even from last year's competition that project would receive a 12 month grant. And then something would happen at some point in 2025 where we would have to indicate to HUD, okay, these are the grants that we want to receive another 12 month grant term for their 2627 term. It's that we didn't it was never clear, like, what that other thing, what that other trigger, would be. We didn't know if HUD would just automatically renew everyone. We didn't know if the COC would have to submit some type of affirmation. And yes, this is these are all the projects we want to have issue them another 12 month grant agreement. So I guess I say that to say, kind of the there never was this understanding that projects would get a 24 month grant agreement. I don't know if that's entirely your question, though.

No, I appreciate the clarification, because I did say, I did say wrong. I did say incorrectly. I think what I meant was like all of the work that you have to do every year. I think, I think there was some conversation, and maybe it was just my misunderstanding, that it wouldn't be as much. It wouldn't be like the entire process that happens every year would be some kind of abbreviated process. Do Do you have any idea if there is still, like, an abbreviated, like, if whatever that difference is going to be this off year in just including street outreach and transitional housing, or just really completely in the dark?

So we are a little bit in the dark. However, my guess is that it is going to be essentially a regular competition with the long COC application that we will have to complete, that we were not anticipating to have to complete, that everything will, apart from perhaps the content of what's in the application and the types of projects that can be funded, I think is going to look the same in terms of the volume of work that will need to be done, if that makes sense. I don't think there's going to be any recognition,

except that you are now having to start months later than you normally start because of this. Yep,

absolutely, that's good time.

Anything else? Tara, no blowing hand. All right. Alan, I see your hand

reach for new programs or existing programs,

you're breaking up a little bit. But I heard a question, I think about the street outreach programs in transitional housing.

Yes, I was asking about the NOFO for the for this year. It's that going to be for new street outreach,

sure. So I don't know. We don't know anything. We won't really know any details until the NOFO is released. And we don't know when it's going to be released. It could come out this week. It could come out in September. It could come out in October. We don't, you know, we really have nothing other than this notification that something is coming at some point, which makes it really helpful. Yes, and to tears point there, we do not have any existing COC funded street outreach programs. The City of Detroit does fund a number. Our street outreach programs, we also have, NSO has a path program, which, again, is street outreach. So you know what we what we can fund, what the what that can look like. All still to come. Any other questions before we get a motion on the recommended evaluation criteria,

I guess, to Amanda, if you can just be just talk to like th as well. Transitional house. Do we have funded through our CEO CD? Is it funded through the city? Or where is it? If it is at all,

sure. So right now, we no longer have any COC funded, what I'll call standalone transitional housing programs. We have some joint component projects, which combines transitional housing and rapid rehousing. We have two of those project types that are targeted to domestic violence, between DV and one that is targeted to youth through yhdp. Over the past 10 to 15 years, the COC has been intentional about moving our COC funding away from transitional housing and funding more rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing that was done for both alignment with HUD's priorities and in alignment with best practices, in alignment with what the research was showing regarding effective interventions for people experiencing homelessness. So while transitional housing renewal. Transitional housing programs have historically been allowable to be funded by HUD. It has been many, many years since HUD has allowed new transitional housing programs to be funded, and HUD sets those criteria every year in their NOFO. So we are anticipating so this will be the first year in many, many years, honestly, I think the first year since I've been with hand, which I've been around for 17 years, that HUD looks like they will be considering new, standalone transitional housing programs. I will also note that every year when HUD releases their NOFO and they indicate, here's all the things that you can spend your new money on, we always have a discussion locally, within the committee and then at the board about, what is it that we want to fund? What is it with this, you know, scope of the types of new projects that HUD says that we can apply for? What do we locally think is going to be the best use of our funding for our community? So those conversations are still to come, once we have more information from HUD,

Thanks, Amanda, yeah, since we're talking about street outreach, I just figured we talk about th as well, just in case aren't familiar with it or haven't been around as long as some of us been not sure about what transitional housing is or where it's funded through. So I thank you for explaining. All right. Any other questions? I'm not seeing any other hands right now, nothing else in the chat. It looks like okay. All right, so Amanda needs a motion for from the Board to approve the recommended 2025 renewal project evaluation and scoring criteria. So do well, I'll do it. I'll make the motion. I'll go ahead and make a motion for the CLC board is act or for the COC Board to approve the recommended 2025 renewal project evaluation and scoring criteria for COC projects

before a second.

Okay, thank you both. I think Celia kind of got on first, and then thank you to Lisa. I appreciate you both. All right,

thank you. So the link to vote is in the chat, and that link will be open until 430 through the rest of the board meeting. We do have another voting item, and I do want to get as close to 255 I had another agenda item on the agenda for today to talk about you saw that on the agenda to do a analysis of our application score. We'll hold on that for a future meeting, because we do also need to talk about recommended changes to the reallocation and threshold appeals policy. So as I go through these slides, I would ask that you keep in mind that this recommendation, it also was in your board packet and these slides, everything was put together before July 3 it was put together. Are when we were still before we really had any additional information from HUD. So just keep that in mind, but this will hopefully become clearer as we go through. So I want to give some just again, some background and context to when we talk about threshold and reallocation, so in a typical review process, so typical year, you know, when we are reviewing projects, when there's the normal competition, renewal projects must earn a score of at least 70% in order to be submitted to HUD for funding. If they score less than 70% they have to file an appeal in order to be considered for continued funding. So that's what 70% is under. That is under threshold. And again, in a typical process for projects board, less than 70% if the appeal was not granted, they the project would be reallocated and would not be submitted to HUD. Reallocation simply means reducing a renewal project's budget, either in whole or in part, and taking those funds and putting it towards new project funding. So in order to use reallocated funds, there has to be something to reallocate to. There has to be some new projects to reallocate that funding to reallocated funds are typically combined with COC bonus funds to create one pool of funding out of which we fund new projects, and typically we hold a new project application process to invite applicants to apply for that new funding. Projects that are then selected for funding are funded out of that pool that combines reallocation and bonus funding. And there are some years where we have no reallocated funding, there are some years where we have more. There are some where we have maybe a small amount. It really varies year to year. So the challenges that we were anticipating with holding a that implementing that kind of typical process for this year was the first one that we were anticipating. There being no new bonus queen, and there was no intent to hold an application process for new projects. Again, this is all pre July 3, additionally running a new project application process just for reallocated funding would be really challenging, given that, when you go into it, you don't know how much, or if any, reallocated funding you would actually end up having. Again, we had the current timeline that we were operating under, with an August deadline, that would simply not be feasible to hold a new project competition if there was an August deadline. And additionally, that late August deadline, that was the only deadline we were working with, would make it extremely challenging to hold any type of typical threshold appeals process, which is typically a three week process after the projects receive their scores, which they're going to be getting their scores, probably early August at this point. So given all of that, the recommendations that were developed for this reallocation and appeals process for 2025 is kind of a four fold recommendation. One is that projects still be allowed to appeal some aspects, and this is no different than last year. They can appeal if they think we calculated their score incorrectly, if they didn't get points for submitting things on time, and they can demonstrate they did those types of perhaps we can call them clerical errors. An agency can steal appeal. That's a way for hand to be held accountable for the work that we do. The second aspect to this recommendation is that if our project does score under threshold, or does score under 70% that it would automatically be placed at the bottom of the ranking list if we do have to rank projects, and it would be placed on a corrective action plan if it was funded. However, the project would not be reallocated in 2025 and so that would then mean for the third point, that there would be no appeals threshold appeals process, because there would be no reallocation in 2025 then the fourth aspect to this recommendation is probably the most relevant. The fourth recommendation says that if HUD does release a revised 2025 no vote that either extends the deadline past August and or provides additional information on the 2025 application process that this current plan for no reallocation and no threshold appeals will be revisited and may be revised. So again, this language was put together before we received the. Notice from HUD that there would be a 2025, NOFO. So I think while there is still a lot of unknowns on any kind of deadlines or what we're looking at, this kind of fourth point may actually come into play this year. So again, the recommendation to summarize, the first one is that projects may still appeal any we'll call it, kind of clerical errors related to calculations of their scores. Projects that score under threshold would be automatically ranked at the bottom of our ranking list if we do have to rank projects, and they would be placed on a corrective action plan, and there would be no threshold appeals, because we would not be reallocating projects, and if there is additional information from HUD, either extends the August deadline or provides other information about the application process this year that this current plan will be revisited, possibly revised, pending whatever that other Information is that we get from HUD. Yes, Jane,

Amanda, the intel that you've received that you've referred to during your presentation, is it, did it come from HUD, or did it come from somebody who has the ear of HUD? Or did it come directly from HUD?

It came directly from HUD, from the snaps office. Yep. And once I'm done with my presentation, I can put a copy of that email

that would be that would be helpful only because I'm just curious who's calling the shots.

Okay, thank you.

Other questions about this recommended reallocation and threshold appeals process, and again, I will emphasize given what we now know from HUD, I highly anticipate that whatever is approved here will need to be revisited, and I'll just say revisited at this point, because I can't, can't say what we may need to change or what we may not want to change, because I have no idea what is in The know, what is going to be in the NOFO but because we are going to be rolling out this project review process to agencies later this week, really am looking to have some level of information on this aspect To be able to communicate the best we can do.

So again. Any other questions before we go to a vote? Applause?

Not seeing any other hands or questions in the chat, okay, all right, all right, so I will make a motion to approve the recommended reallocation and threshold appeals process for 2025 Do we have a second?

A second?

Thank you, Regina,

okay, thank you the link. So the second link in the chat is for this motion again, that link will be open until 430 this afternoon, just quick next steps, assuming that these recommendations are approved today, we will be rolling out this information on July 10 to our current agencies. They've all received notice of this webinar, and they have the zoom link, and we'll be sending out a reminder email to everyone tomorrow, but just to know that we're going to be putting this in motion later this week, that is all I have. I know I went over a couple of minutes. Thank you for your time, and I will turn the floor back over to Erica. Thank

you. Thank you so much. Amanda, again, appreciate all of the information definitely needed and to keep us all abreast of what's happening, what's going on, and we, of course, appreciate all the questions and clarifications. So thank you. Thank you all All right, so it looks like Cindy started to share her screen already, so we can move into our next report, which is, which is our cam evaluation report. So Cindy, if you are there and repeat,

I am, can you see?

I mean, there we are, over to you,

and we hear you.

Yeah, good, excellent, excellent. Anyway, welcome everyone, and what a great presentation. I represent several continuum of care and Amanda. That's exactly how we're all pivoting very quickly so, and I would also say that we don't even know what potential implications could be on a coordinated entry process. We don't know, but you know, as we move forward, I think that we are, we're still leaving the Detroit area that continued here on a really good footing in with a lot of these federal changes. So I want to start with this is what I consider the final report, the actual document that you all saw, pretty lengthy. A lot of material to go through. This presentation is going to go over highlights and the 14 specific recommendations and and then provide that opportunity to get discussion these recommendations come from all the amount of information that I received during this many months process. And remember that this is Orco consulting and my team, with great amount of input, kind of our recommendations for consideration for the continuum of care. So when we think about that document, that report that you received, kind of giving context to where were we, the Request for Proposal went out, and then, then, by the time that the Orco was selected. I included in that report kind of what was going on during that moment. Talk about the methodologies. You know, what did we look at? What did we research? Who did we talk to? And then overall, the 14 key recommendations across four key subject areas, very similar to the four major components of coordinated entry. We had a stakeholder survey summary

that is also provided in the report, and also included just thinking about as we move forward and we do kind of annual evaluations. You know, when do you need to bring in a consultant, and when do we just continue to monitor and evaluate, and not only for continual care funding, but overall as a system of care. So the context and the environment looking at what happened right when, in fact, it was probably one week after the first startup conference. The was the tragedy, the tragedy in February of the unsheltered family, and so that was really top of mind as we began to do our early investigations and and thinking about how we respond when people are seeking help access to shelter. So understand that that was a kind of top of mind for a lot of our discussions during the beginning, also part of the context in the environment of this evaluation was looking at kind of the real culture change, where there was, there's multiple agencies now, you went through an extensive transformation of your system and a transition of new contracts that were led and A very different structure of the system with more providers, and so the whole cam delivery had changed. I put this in some highlight another context environment we think we go into evaluation with a lot of different opinions and different perspectives. Yes, those were presented. But also I wanted to note that in my independent third party evaluation, talking with people, one on one, talking with groups, talking with providers, talking with recipients of Coordinated Entry services, there was a great deal of consensus. So even though it may not seem in this common zoom meetings that we have when we're dealing with specific policy making decisions, when we had a larger view of what was going on, there was a great deal of consensus on items that we needed to change and even methodologies in which to change. So thinking about that as a context, another component of the evaluation is sort of setting the table. Is some themes and just two primary themes to think about the whole entire role of coordinated entry, which is have a common way where people can access services when they're experiencing housing or homeless crisis, and when we think about system metrics and overall, why are we all here? We want to know that when people experience homelessness, we reduce the length of time people are homeless thinking about the length of time homeless, the length of stay in homelessness, one of the most profound performance metrics that can be influenced through coordinated entry and another theme that was prevalent in both recommendations evaluation. Consensus disagreement is that we have really moved from that one primary cam lead provider to an entire system of very interdependent provider partners. In other words, it is a team effort. It implicates for hand to be successful. Wayne Metro needs to be successful. For community home supports to be successful, we need Wayne metro to be successful, for the back office system to work well. When, when it all works well, we all do well when any point, any component of coordinated entry or any provider needs help. That means we all need to pitch in, because it's very interrelated and interdependent now. And so how do I look at that? In this, this display, in this PowerPoint, I have this icon, length of time homeless, that in one of my in each recommendation, if there is a the recommendation could potentially have an impact on length of time homeless, I noted, and the same with system. This is about improving the system. This is about improving the way we communicate and get things done. Help people move through the system faster. Help our partners in this space. Help the housing providers in the space. How helping those individuals and the providers that may be one degree of separation from cam implementing partners in lead how it can help the system. So it's just a way to think about how our evaluation really has is a means to an end of improved services and system delivery. The recommended categories are in four key areas. I'll stop at the upper left corner of the screen, access to the homeless response system that they big component of coordinating Coordinated Entry access assessments and housing planning tool when people are presenting, what tools are we using? What questions are we asking, and how are we setting people up to be thinking about a housing solution, prioritization, match and referral to housing resources. A very strong component of our work is with few resources, sometimes diminished resources or scarce resources. How are we prioritizing those specific resources? How are we matching people up? How are we referring individuals? So if we're trying to create a unified system and standards to help people access the services they need, appropriate services they need, or the appropriate amount of engagement that we apply from our scarce resources, what do those recommendations look like? And then finally, thinking about leadership and collaboration, how we work together, how we communicate, how we're informing one another, and how those things also can have an implication on the length of time people experiencing homelessness, as well as overall system effectiveness and efficiency. So I'm going to start with the first component, access to the homeless response system access was very top of mind. There are more recommendations here, because we think about what what happened in February. We think about the demand and the need and the conversation for unsheltered and unhoused people to access shelter, limited access to shelter. We just came out of a season of winter and thinking about how the systems and the things that we we are doing are can be improved. So the first I'm going to minimize the screen here, so the first recommendation expand client engagement and housing barrier, problem solving at in person, access point locations. So it really says we have an intake process. We have uniform tools. We ask in a very similar way what people need at those in person, access point locations. But what we found in looking at some of the rationale and evidence is that what we were also doing is we're really continuing to increase, building wait lists people come and present at the in person, to expand from the phone because we know that homelessness is a very real, physical experience that people want to see somebody or visit someone, or the phone system is not working for them, but making sure that we actually meet people where they are when we look at some of the evidence, and there's a great deal of Coordinated Entry cam output report information that's updated regularly, that's available to everyone. What we began to see, and this is just pulling from quarter four of 2024 that when you come for help, when you present, 82% of those individuals are seen, are placed on an emergency shelter wait list. This is important, but in that process, in that intake process, there's a lot of information that we learn about a person's crisis, and what are we how can we have those intake workers? How. Those assessors, where able and where practical, begin to start that problem solving. Yes, you're on an emergency shelter wait list, but we've just learned a lot of information. So this is my terminology, tier one. Tier two could be step one. Step two could be in the same way you call for help, a helpline, a customer service line. Just think about products, not about the human services field that we're looking at. And have you ever called and you said, I'm having a problem with my computer? The AI or the call taker goes through the first five things that they know how to solve, and then you get stepped up to another level. We got basic information, updated information, but let me take you to tier two, in other words, an advanced support person. So this comes out of the interviews. This comes out of discussion. This comes out of our data. What would it mean if at in person, while you're there, while you have physically come to the facilities of NOAA and Cas, and also, I would say the VA, what could we start to do? The advantage is you have a captain audience. They're in the building. They're in front of you right now, the persons with lived experience

in homelessness, those feedbacks to small focus groups, they all talked about, yes, I'm glad you're here, but then, because they were pre emergency shelter, or they were in drop in but not in shelter, or had yet to be able to get assigned, thinking about, what can we do that they all expressed that they're waiting for help, constantly waiting for help, not waiting on a housing priority list, but waiting for help. What could we do at that moment? Another thing that came out when we talked to individual providers is that if you're a call taker and you run the script and you put it in HMIs, and you get the basic data to go into Salesforce or to the emergency shelter wait list, they would like to have more few wins other than say there's no shelter available. Thank you for following and this is this is your next step, even though maybe they heard something about an ID, or they heard something about a complication in a snaps application, or maybe there was a disruption in a Social Security SSI benefit, or maybe there was something about youth services, or maybe they heard something about Senior Services or another entity in which we, as a homeless responses, actually have a lot of working knowledge that we know that until that is also resolved, that there was still be, there will still be time of things that need to be worked on, excuse Me, before someone could be housed, or someone needed to communicate. There is some diversion, slight diversion, going on discussions at intake, but primarily we're queuing people up for more waiting. How could we find some other things that we can do, reprogramming, call taker, vacancy and transition positions to tier two problem solving. This could be an idea, because the more and I will talk a little bit more about that. Do we spend more money on more on call takers who are only going to put someone on a waiting list? Or could we think about how we reallocate resources to dive into that tier two, thinking about balancing the call wait times to actually reducing overall time that they are homeless by addressing low hanging housing care or housing barrier and care needs. So a little bit more about tier two, housing problem solving services. We've always used that language in talking about diversion and some of that goes on. I was I had to leave my family's home because I wasn't on the lease. There was a family conflict. I lost my job, but my check doesn't come in for three weeks. So we all begin to hear things that are contributing to the loss of housing, especially for first time housing, what we could what do we need to consider? And in this recommendation, one, you heard me say, Here's my recommendation. Then I said rationale and evidence, and then also I include implementation consideration. This is how your recommendation the cam evaluation report is also organized. So when we think about, how would we expand and dive deeper after we've done initial assessment and intake. Well, thinking about the staffing at Wayne Metro, thinking about the call takers, thinking about those that are at Cass as well as NOAA. Assess the cam assessor skills. Some of them come from senior services. Some may come from re entry. Some may be, you know, new folks that have just graduated with their social work degree, thinking about the skills and knowledge that we have, and think about how we could create some specialized areas building, uh, build basic individual housing plan framework. We'll talk about that later. We're doing a lot of into intake and getting a lot of information. The questions we ask, thinking about how we could build out a housing planning framework tool, thinking about even reassigning folks. When you think about literally the physical space, people come in the morning. They sign up for assessment those tier one, what we're doing now, maybe in the mornings, and maybe the tier two, are you here? Are you? Can you come back later this morning? Can you come back right after lunch? After we close to have and I will assign you to someone to work on those ID problems or to talk more about that diversion potential, in other words, a way to continue to create slow and stepping up the level engagement based on the needs of the client. Access, access. Recommendation Number two, increased collaboration between cam and street outreach, including mobile access as an expansion of cam inversion engagement. This response to several things, like the difficulty sometimes to actually getting to Casa Noah, looking at the way you are already implementing street outreach, you get a call in on then those referrals are made to street outreach, and then they drive to that specific area, trying to find the individual client. We know that there's also already activity going on at Wayne Metro, thinking about a van. Now, caveats, which what Amanda just talked about. Maybe there will be new opportunities in this new organizing to actually apply for a new application of expanding street outreach and addressing unsheltered needs. And this specific access recommendation, you can see system combining and collaborating more closely coordinated entry with street outreach and also thinking about the length of time people experiencing homelessness, they call this is my first time homeless. Me and my kids are in a car. How quickly we can get that connection made? How expansive is it? How is it organized? How can we not only just do an initial assessment, but click into tier two to try and reduce the length of time homeless, unsheltered, rationale and evidence continue to address barriers for service, for the unhoused, uncomfortable or unable to access in person or phone, we're trying to expand the possibilities again, meeting people where they are. Target populations could be geographic areas. Could be encampments, or maybe there's a need to do pop up access at a drop in during inclement weather, be it winter time or during excessive heat. Thinking about how we can better reallocate and increase the number of effective engagements access. Recommendation number three, expand investments. Yep, we're talking money in resources supporting a progressive engagement approach to rehousing efforts across all acuity group, a lot of lingo there in our business. Progressive engagement, the more you need, the more I engage rehousing efforts. That should be our first line of defense. We're figuring out you hear the language, housing focused, shelter, housing focused street outreach, and also thinking about all acuity groups, because there's some people who are employed, very economic and poverty related, people who've been evicted, then we have those that have a lot of CO occurring disorders, going to require a lot more work, maybe a different specialization and a different type of street outreach team, or a different type of engagement at shelter. So thinking about all the investments that we're making now, can we realign to make sure that we are addressing need across multiple acuities? Think of your groups that we do, the housing priority list. AG, one. AG, two. AG, three. AG, for the different acuity groups, they come with different assets, different skills, different abilities. And how do we go ahead and address that so we see movement out of homelessness from multiple areas, again, addressing both length of time and homeless, and also thinking about supporting our system where it needs it most rationale, evidence, and this is where, when we did the survey, the provider survey, it was kind of split between people we it takes too long on the phone, takes too long, but more call thinkers, but if you're just increasing the number of people or the more frequently they're told that you're going to be on a list. Well, when we looked into the data, the repeat callers 26% increase to 32% from in 2025 meaning that people who call cam there's again, you all collect great information and data the number of people who keep calling back to Cam, because primarily, all they got was a wait list is increasing. Am I Is there any shelter yet? Is there any shelter yet? Because that's the primary thing that we're giving out, is that we have your information. So more call takers isn't going to reduce the repetitive call. Calls or not necessarily repeat the number of calls, because the evidence is showing us that we're providing a lot of calls. But what people are need is something related to that tier two care, next level of support to continue housing, problem solving, discussions as timely as that critical time intervention. That's a phraseology review news for people who have co occurring disorders, and when they're ready to be helped is usually when they made a call and said, I need help. Take advantage of that in a critical time intervention methodology and start the housing planning process. Now

this is a very old diagram. I've used it in several communities. This talks about at the top, the progressive engagement steps. Step one, we're triaging. Hello, Pam, how can I help you? We know that we're already through the Detroit housing helpline. The majority of calls coming into cam, we have already identified them as an imminent risk of homelessness or experiencing homeless, so that part is acting really well. Step two, can we give our housing crisis specialists, our assessors, more diversion resources, more time, our second level of care, and not just cam, street outreach, emergency shelter, the individuals in our space who are actually witnessing the homelessness in real time, my car is pulling up to that tent. They are now inside my drop in center in my emergency shelter. What? What are we doing to engage other than assessment, to start that housing solving process, and then, as you move to step three, initial assessment, we're assessing for need, but we should married to that of need is a basic housing plan to address what they just told us, that full assessment, which you all do through CHS, that comprehensive assessment, that full spdat, when are we doing it? When it is necessary, when we are beginning to understand episodic homelessness, individuals for higher level of need and moving to housing placement. On the bottom you see the phase assessment approach. Tools. We've got our we've got some tools we're using now, the VI, spdat, what we talk about later, thinking about when our when do our screening tools actually attach themselves to a housing problem solving framework, things we could answer and resolve now and then. We intensify our engagement. We intensify our assessment as we begin to understand increased need. Thinking about individuals who chronic, maybe they've disappeared from the system for six months or nine months, they're back in bypass that step one, step two, and have a component that can immediately plug them into those higher levels of need. So this is looking at a long time ago. We look at the picture on the left, that funnel, and this recommendation is about thinking about reallocating investments. And maybe there will be an opportunity here, as we see what this new NOFA looks like, or telling the community the new investments that we need. Thinking about that pilot project of your rapid shelter exit program that's been going on right now, we say we have all these ways you come into the system, lots of different ways, and then we're going to put you in that funnel and then have conversations with you, do assessments, give you shelter or put you on a housing list for potential subsidy, be it one time, short term or long term. What I'm looking at here, and trying to just conceptually, is tell the community we need to invert that. Yes, we need an access point that needs to be structured, but when people are telling us what they need, rather than having a funnel that's weightless, heavy at the top, convert it to more of street outreach, more mobile access, more people to have that second level of conversation. That's why I have three little people talking figurines there. Yes, we do data, more shelter drop in or specific resources for housing, we really have to think about, rather than continuing to expand the front door, expand the back door, and the methods and the means of getting people out of the system by having a housing problem solving and having a structure and A framework for housing planning access recommendation number four, develop more comprehensive, coordinated entry policies and procedures for people experiencing domestic violence and victims of violence. Most of this information came out of the conversations key informant interviews, as well as the

provider survey. And looking at the policies and procedures, they're very brief. We know we need to do more, and I know already, which is very common when a community is being evaluated, because I've been on the ground for almost six months now, is that we identify problems. You all have already starting to go to work, calling people together, thinking about not only the length of time. People experience homelessness when you are and victim service providers, but understand as a system, how can we be better? How can we do more? Some of the evidence of this rationale is looking at the length of time on shelter placement list, and you can see that it depends on your monitor, what you may be seeing, you can see that in many categories, the second or third, most frequent wait list, or the time on wait list, the length of time is in that category of domestic violence. So what can we do? How can we expand victim service providers to overall homeless resources? How can homeless service providers be better connected and understand that world to make sure that people who are entering homelessness through a door of victimization and violence, that we make sure that as a system, we're very well coordinated and see where we can shave off length of time homeless or improve resources number five recommendation for access, develop more easily understood and better organized client resource materials to facilitate manageable self navigation and self resolution problem solving. Remember when I said increasing the opportunity across all acuity groups, thinking about how we give people information. Thank you. You're on the wait list. We've done intake, and maybe it's just a phone. Let me email you. Let me text you. Information. Very specific that goes on now, but looking at all the other information, what's a street outreach? Hand out. How do we get information to folks? Do we hand them stacks of stacks of paper that we photograph or photocopy. They're wore up. They roll them up. They're in their backpacks, thinking about right sizing. Some of the different information so we can these are emergency services. These are short term, one time opportunities and resources. Here's the longer term resources and what they require. You all have the rationale is just figuring out other communities have figured out to create different types of guides and things that are helpful for different outlets and different areas of care, street outreach, having that foldable, waterproof information so you're leaving them with something that is smaller, that won't get jumped lost, making sure that all first responders and other folks within that homeless response space have those materials, thinking about, there's housing support, thinking about non housing support, and making sure, in general, we use the language that people understand, that we don't overwhelm them with so much information that they don't need, and in shelter or in drop in centers, hey that even though that is an emergency response system, how well is our shelter in identifying information and resource boards? Are they up to date? Are they accurate? Are in the languages and words that everyone can understand, and you all have pretty fantastic graphic design and communication talents at hand away Metro and what this is one of the primary ways that you get people with lived experience involved. Let them tell you what's easy to read and what's not, what's understandable and what's not, and get their ideas for distribution. Okay, so that's part one. I'm looking at the clock, I'm going to go a little bit faster to make sure that I make my timeline, as well as Amanda did assessment and housing planning tools. The second category, eliminate use of the vi spdat, complete and utter, absolute consensus on that. We know that the state had been working on, and I had seen some of the work on a universal the mishta group to try to have a universal assessment tool for triage. And so I know that there's a lot of different information being looked at. I have been a part of another a couple other communities, and specifically St Louis, and already sent up to both hand and to Wayne Metro, other different ways of getting information. So the recommendation six is also combined with another recommendation later, but you have consensus to remove it. It has little impact. That's that small tree house document, beginning of acuity, group designation. And we know how scores can change. We know how the assessment, that initial assessment environment, can impact the score, so it needs the document needs to be replaced. And so when we think about implementation, consideration, all right, if we're going to be rethinking, especially if we're tier one and tier two, or step one, step two, thinking about a couple levels of care on the front end of our system, thinking about determining what factors, what information do you really need to know in the beginning to determine referrals to CSH housing navigation right now, it's primarily street outreach referral or if you enter shelter, um. Up. But we know people's housing needs is not contingent. Yvonne, do I have a street outreach worker or do I get shelter? Thinking about how we can begin to help people the minute they engage us, the minute they knock on our door and ask for help, looking at progress for the statewide. We know, where is that a tool at Do we wait or do we go ahead and start making modification. Now, what is the implication on our yhdp that uses the Tay, the transitional age youth? Is there still some appropriate use of the biz SP that other tools in different settings and thinking about progressive engagement, ask more when you need to know more, and don't ask for information that at which minute you ask it, you don't use any of it from a trauma informed perspective.

Recommendation seven, this is kind of related, all right, if we come up with a new assessment tool, how can we make it more rich in housing needs and barriers that help us to be able to immediately have an develop an action plan, even if it's a preliminary housing plan, even if it's us cam in the beginning, starting the rehousing process, even knowing you may be handing it off to a shelter, or you may be handing it off to a housing focused street outreach worker. If you think about expanding our street outreach, but focusing on housing problem solving and rapid exit from shelter or rapid exit from our system, some of the rationale and efforts is when you look at those acuity groups, remember acuity group one, thinking about the number that come in when we have a system that is so heavily focused on resolving homelessness for acuity group one and two. And then you look and you see that the majority of people asking for help on three and four. You can see that we need to think about our investments and the questions we ask to address acuity group three and four. So three and four, they may there is some income present, possibly there is no diagnosis, diagnosed, disabling condition. There. There are barriers to housing, as they have had a lease before. They have had employment before, employed now. So thinking about our system to create movement and not top front load, everything to the smallest percentage, and thinking about how we reinvest our efforts majority of persons just are moderate and low acuity doesn't mean that we can't help. It means we need to identify their assets, their strengths, their incomes, their abilities. What those barriers are, as quick as possible and have a responsive system. Could it be street outreach? Could it be cam could it be those rapid exit programs when they first enter emergency shelter, rehousing focus system from the very first engagement, and that includes camp focus assessments on housing barriers and needs over acuity, diving into mental health health, addiction, substance abuse, services, especially for people who are first time homeless or are returning to homeless after a long hiatus, not not entering the system. Maybe it's 12 months or more. Maybe it's 24 months or more, making sure that we have a process and organized system addressing those needs, begin rehousing conversations and building that housing plan. So thinking about, what does a housing assessment tool component look like? I've already provided information to some of the providers and go more in depth in the report. I mean the common things that what the household looks like, what are their strengths, their challenges, the employment capacity and capacity to maintain housing. I would also note in the brief email that was sent out by HUD on July 3, in relationship to the NOFO, it was, it was just a few sentences, but we're hearing exactly what they said in Project 2025, right address addictions and substance use, recovery and treatment, and focus on employment. Focus on treatment, focus on employment. So thinking about, Well, absolutely agreed, especially for acuity three and four. So how are we organized? How are we collecting information and addressing that? Looking at case management needs, their preferences, what strengths they have in that process, thinking about, how would we implement a new housing, first, a housing framework and thinking about a housing assessment tool, a housing needs assessment tool. Look at the tools that are out there. They're a lot out there in the sphere of continuum of cares, no need in inventing a wheel. Find out what works best and the resources and the organization of cam as you have it now. Asset map those commonly required support so they are just one call to call, no more than maybe one degree of separation from Coordinated Entry intake and emergency shelter, thinking about acuity, three and four groups, just because they're at the highest level of need, if you actually were. Engage after with some good tools and the materials for self resolution. It can be that someone, when that and that housing resource room at a shelter could probably help and answer questions immediately, save someone 123, weeks of homelessness, they try to figure out the red tape and our complicated system of care, prioritization, match and referral to housing resources, recommendation eight, adopt a dynamic prioritization. Here's some big some big words, dynamic prioritization, proportional allocation policy. These are just tools to use to continue to see movement through our system and get our wait list moving more quickly and more and that pivot and adapt to local conditions and resources. Again, these both can impact length of time homeless and our overall system of care. This is an old graphic from pre or right before 2019 essentially as coordinated entry systems got going in 2017 2018 all over United States, everybody was starting to experience the same kind of problems. Their their lists were static, but the individual people experiencing homelessness, lives change, family situation, change, employment change. You got could have got worse. Could have got could have got better. Things happen. Stakeholders lack confidence in that score, that everything about our communities. What score do you have when it didn't really address the person centered needs? The list is long and getting longer. And so the challenge was, well, think about, how could we more dynamically, prioritize, continually making adjustments to our list, adding other resources of case conferencing, communication between agencies, and other information used, besides the score, to think about how we're serving people, what resources in our community we're offering them.

When we think about proportional allocation, this is just sort of a stripped down a definition allocation, right distribution of scarce resources, how we distribute the vacancies and the housing opportunity or diversion resources or hotel motel voucher resources, thinking about how we allocate creating flow through the system for multiple populations, from emergency shelter, from chronic families, from unsheltered, from transfers, Rapid Rehousing to Psh, in other words, thinking about our resources, when you just say, AG, one gets this, AG, two gets this, and nothing moves, you can see that you're going to have a lot of populations where movement isn't happening. So here's an example. Let's say this month, the month of July, at our case conferencing, we have 10 PSH units available. We've had some turnover. We know some units are coming up off as one. And we think about where we are, 40% will go to unsheltered 40% can go to emergency shelter, and 20% to transfers. In other words, people we try to put in Rapid Rehousing learn more about them. They were they were eligible for chronic before we went to rapid rehousing. Gave it a go, but they need to transfer. So you can see that, rather than currently, if there's 10 PSH available, what do we do? Remy goes to that list. We start at the top of the list, the family, or look and see who's the next person on the list, and those are already scored for unsheltered. What if we moved it around for the proportion? Say we need to see movement out of our shelter so our unsheltered have access to shelter. We need. We know that we want to do it a we are under a housing first model that if Rapid Rehousing doesn't work. We can go to Psh, but we that only needs to be proportion. We can't give them all of our our beds available. Thinking about, can we play with the percentages? That's what proportional allocation, dynamic prioritization as a practice of adjusting the prioritization factors right. The sorting, not just top of list always, not just always, AG, one chronic gets the next bed and or sorting the order to address seasonal impacts, resource changes or other list management. So these are two theories and methodologies to see movement across the system of care. So for dynamic prioritization example, sort by unsheltered in extreme weather, right? What? What? It's the middle of winter. We know we've got january, february bearing down on us. We're going to sort by unsheltered first that are chronic, and then maybe, and if there and then, and then move to shelter because we're trying to save lives. You can see that if we're in our shelter, then we're going to say, yes, we're going to take our shelter folks, not just by chronic but the ones that have been in our shelter the longest. Again, these are thinking about length of time homeless as one of our key themes of things that we want to try and get to reduce prioritization. Recommendations, and when you go to the report, there's a lot more detail in there, and some examples of how you would change sorting and how you would change prior the proportionality of vacancies available. Recommendation nine, emphasize transfers complex cases and cohort discussions during case consult meetings to maximize the use of the time between cam the housing navigators and the housing providers. And I saw minutes from a couple meetings, and I attended one. It is a great process. Case, consult, case, conferencing. Meetings are good. The only time it gets a little frustrating for everyone involved is when we're updating a spreadsheet that could easily have been updated before you met, so that you can start talking about the top five people on the AG, one list that are not accepting housing, or you get this close, and then you can't find the client. And as a system of care, thinking about how we can target that top 25 list that's driving up our length of time, homeless, causing frustration. How can we communicate better in making sure that we're we're being very person centered, yet we're also working together as a team and not blaming Well, I'm waiting for someone to get me a document. I'm waiting for an email I never got that referral through the Salesforce system, making that back office of our system of care work more efficiently and also able to have those Heart to Heart discussions about clients that are very complex and that we have a discussion to see how we can work As a team to finally successfully house that individual prioritization recommendation, recommendation number 10, standardize the expectations of transitioning clients from housing navigation to housing providers and and this is addressing both needs from key informant interviews. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it takes longer, but when we don't, when we finally make a housing offer, we finally got a match from the Ag one ag two list. We finally got them together. We don't want the way we communicate, the way we work together, to add links of time in homelessness, or somehow that housing opportunity slips through our hands because of our system, because the way our system operates, when we think about coordination communication between navigators and housing providers, we're still in a deal could be transitional. Housing could be rapid. Housing could be from sort of housing could be HCV. Sometimes it's my job, sometimes it's the other agency's job, but more often, it's our job. It needs cam working with navigators and street outreach and shelters, working with all the housing providers together and say, Well, they didn't do it. Well, they didn't do it. Don't sit around and wait. Let's have a system where we absolutely pick up the phone call and say, John is still here. Are you so close? I think we I know you. I found an apartment form. But hey, housing provider, if you don't do X, Y and Z and respond, I'm going to lose that unit. We don't want our system to be adding days to length of time homeless. This is just an example thinking about everybody involved when we got a housing deal on the table, there's the client, there's the program participant, they may have maybe a cam participant. They may be a street outreach participant. They may be a emergency shelter participant. Thinking about there's expectation, what do we need to do? Make sure we have updated contact information. Let them know. Do they let them be deeply informed. If all they know is Noah's, the NOAA office building where cam is that's okay. We got space use that as a drop in center. Maybe that's a meeting place, okay? The current cam or case manager, or whoever is in the zone, whatever implementing partner, making sure that they're keeping everything up to date. All the information is there, not fussing over the documentation, verification of homelessness, verification, diagnosis, documentation, work together as a team. Sometimes the best person to document homelessness is a street outreach worker who witnessed it, the emergency shelter who witnessed it. Yes, put that in the HMIs. Make sure every time you see that client, you recorded that service provision, because that could be the difference between eligibility and checking off that last 90 days of homelessness for chronic eligibility, and the housing provider making sure you're doing things consistently so that cam knows what to expect. Be very upfront about everything that's expected, make it easy to get your your intake information, your application information, timely follow up, but thinking about how we're working together and that expectation, there is a lot of expectations in the cam MOU for hand, CSH Wayne Metro, no a cast, but the housing provider also needs to have some. Expectations and maybe some of that can be supported. Also thinking about COC HCV providers that are selected, making sure that they start to be as uniform in their processes as we're trying to be on the front end, leadership and collaboration recommendation, these are together. This is just from my observing you guys. I will tell you as someone who works in many different CoCs, and what I just witnessed in your COC board meeting today, are deeply organized, very well documented, and so you're doing things very well,

and you also are deeply inclusive. You make sure that everyone has voice, but thinking about balancing internet based meetings with in person meetings so that we continue to build networks relationships, it's easy to criticize when all you've got is chat or or Zoom meetings or black boxes with people's names on it. When we meet together, solve problems better. It's just part of the how we are as humans and how we work together, thinking about, is there a better way to do that? Maybe we have quarterly in person meetings with case case consult meetings, because then we get to know each other, introduce new employees, and then we can actually start solving some different problems and building our networks before and after our meetings, recommendation 12, create a more disciplined and timely approach deposits and procedure decision making. You can. You're already doing it. Be inclusive, but also we don't want to have our inability to make timely, quick decisions, to increase the length of time people experiencing homelessness. And again, another way to improve our system effectiveness and efficiency. So think about and one way to think about this, think about every meeting you attend related to the COC cam, street outreach, the data, tech, HMIs, all the different things, governance, planning, the shelter prioritization, pilot work. But think about all these needs, all important, all critical, unique inputs, and some of you are a little bit of all of these now. Times that by every person in a meeting and their salary group, add all that up. Are there some things that you are make, decision making, decisions about that? You know what we told cam governors is their job. Let's trust them to do that job. We trusted our cam lead to do this. We put it in an MOU Let's trust that that they will get it done in that setting. When do we need street outreach and when do maybe some of these meetings and spaces need to come together for effectiveness and efficiency and communication so we can make a decision quicker. Leadership recommendation, we're all this is number 13. There's 14 recommendation, monitoring and evaluation of the cam lead implementing partners and overall coordinated entry system should be developed to ensure compliance with both HUD and Detroit COC MOU expectation. We heard from Amanda earlier that there's already an accountability factor. You look at what HUD said about the collaborative application points, and you carry that forward as a refunding process. But this really has to do with both HUD, a continued care is supposed to monitor and evaluate its Coordinated Entry System, just like it does an HMIs system on a regular basis. You have all the tools in place. You have all the spaces in place. But thinking about, you know, we don't want to have to go through an RFP and hire an org, co type organization constantly. How can we better self monitor? You've already given yourself tremendous tools for this, and this is really about the system expectation and overall, having increased confidence in your Coordinated Entry processes and all the different implementing partners, because now they're interdependent on each other. And how can we consistently apply the same measure of expectation to each of our implementing partners? Recommendation four, renew existing cam lead COC, this is very org code. After six months of watching and also having been a process, I'm making a recommendation that you use the this process, recommendation three, to reaffirm or to be a part of your evaluation, as opposed to going out to a full fledged RFP process and the next year or two, because I think you've got the tools there. I think you should renew your grant agreements. You could put a caveat. Obviously, there's always this, you know, 3060, 90, I can't remember if you put 180 days out if someone doesn't want to do the process anymore, but you guys have really dramatically in the last 18 months since the implement implementation improved. Always hiccups, always disagreements, always if I was done or not, have done it this way, but there was general consensus and no major opinion based on survey, key important interviews. Other work group discussions that you've got a really serious right? It takes all four tires to keep this thing moving down the road, and you don't have any flat tires right now, so using some of the systems to say we're doing what we are, but we still need to hold people accountable. My rationale and evidence is what I just said, you have a strong cam MOU, that it's that document on the back of the COC cam MOU, with all the different things that are expected, the roles and responsibilities. So you already have the roadmap of what is expected and the mechanism to evaluate. So you have everything in place, especially with the change of administration federally. And there's a lot of as Amanda, there's a lot of known unknowns, and there's a lot of unknown unknowns out there. Let's keep our community stabilized. Let's make improvements. Let's listen to what everybody said, and let's make our incremental changes, but let's not add more trauma to our system of care necessary, but just meet more often. Let's continue to communicate and work as a team, because we're interdependent. So a part of the evaluation that I also include is just some really just a simple example of how you could do cam assessments, or self assessments, and I'm going to show you just a little snapshot, but it's in your report. You have the tools for cam MOU roles, responsibilities already laid out. As I mentioned before, it could be the cam partners could do an initial self assessment, evaluated by the cam Governance Committee, and it could be carried forward in your renewal process with the NoVo and what the NoVo says, and also making sure that you are also that HUD cam, that the HUD compliant, that's the all the 24 CFR, 578, stuff. And then I adapted one from the HUD, CPD, community planning and development tool that can be used, usually it's used by your feed or camp governance or by hand. They're very accustomed to what that document looks like, because they both have to evaluate their subrecipient as well as the system and keeping it very HUD oriented. I have that. This is just just one little screenshot. For example, the blue table you see where it says, Cam, shelter navigation, Cam unsheltered, navigation, waste if you want to do the score, this is just taking your already existing MOU and saying, okay, community home support. They're an implementing partner. They provide shelter navigation, unsheltered navigation, and they do cam, yhdp youth, just simply looking at the responsibilities. You all laid those out. You all already agreed to it, and everybody signed the MOU just using those things where CSH was involved, have them do a score, something simple, perform the low expectation of the MOU one met expectation. Two exceeded expectations. Three and having comments so that you actually have a tool that they could self assess and expedite away and where there's low scoring, either self assessed or evaluated by hand or camp governance, you would have a mechanism over the next year or two to continually assess your system and really focus on the improvements rather than an entire evaluation process. And so there is another HUD tool I also put in there. It's pretty HUD centric and COC interim role focused, but it gives you some tools to start from in thinking about how we can build some self assessment evaluation tools, that was a lot. You gave me 60 minutes and I talked for 60 minutes, but I, but I, obviously I need to hear feedback from you all.

Moving forward from here, happy to answer any questions.

I don't have a question, but as the chair of the camp Governance Committee, Alan Rosetta here, I'd like to thank you, Cindy, for an extremely thorough assessment and some pretty solid recommendations. Welcome.

And what I love about is is like you all are action oriented. Nobody sits around. We all agree. We have consensus. Let's start solving problems right before the evaluation. Which is, which is a sign, I will tell you as a consultant of a healthy community of care.

Thank you. So Cindy, it looks like Dr Thomas had a question. I. Um, obviously, she said, Thank you. Great information, but not sure if she missed this thoughts from having 24 camp. So

okay, you're talking about lunch. I'm going to say, I'll answer it two ways. I'm assuming 24/7 call center. And you know, you can think of any human services response system when it's an emergency, 911, and let's just think about how expensive that is and what that does. I think if you have that auto response, because if you look at your call data, of course, the time, you have all that data to see how low it goes at night, but you don't want to miss that person as long as you say, and I think you've established that if this is an emergency, please hang up a call. 911, we hear that in a very many avenues. I think as long as you have that, and have a response and a mechanism for the people who are paid to be 24/7, right, who think of first responders, I've seen a lot of communities will do a second shift street outreach. That can be an expansion of that, but I think you would be as far as coordinated entry, being a first responder to human crisis, you're not funded to be one, but having a mechanism or a call forwarding system, most communities, I won't say, most the communities I've been involved with, that if there is an overnight need and you can't fund a third, a third, watch, treat outreach teams, both communities can't afford it, unless you're A big you know, LA, New York, Boston, I know they have major systems, as long as you have a routing, if this is emergency now, and you'll punch to and have that only turn on 8pm to 4am or whatever that window is, and it goes to a live human, which could be A non first responder, non, 911, sometimes it's a drop in center an emergency shelter that could say that maybe because they're up all night, right? Shelters 24/7, there's different ways to respond it, but to have a call center that has no resource to offer in the middle of the night. Why create that? But unless that's important to this community, and I think you're the report that was put out, I think was the end of February, right after the tragedy, had some strategies were there. So I would, I don't know where you are in that process, and in in person, I don't know how you could afford it. I other 24/7 made police stations available, and not, not that most people would go to that shelter, just having a place for people to go if they call the number. Yeah,

exact, saying the just, I don't know if I see Sarah responded, which I was gonna say, this he has worked towards,

and it's, and that's another one of those. Okay, so we're, let's say we're, we're going to, here's what I would do, tragedy in February, you came up with a plan. You're implementing these 24/7 plans. I would say, before November, December, I would say, bring in people lived experience. Bring in Motor City, mint, bring in the people that have been involved, the police station, the safe havens, and have a have a good sit down all half day workshop. Is it working? Are we ready for this winter? What's our plan? What's not working? People lived experience. And just modify that plan before it gets cold, which I'm sure it's already in the books, but you piloted something, and let's see. Let's see what the results are. Up there you go see, yeah, yes, yes, yeah. Cass, I saw that that you all put together through Google Maps. That was cool. Yeah.

And just as a board, I'm not done with my work yet. Now we go, we're trying to get those cam policies and procedures updated. There's a lot of things have been happening, and this is so common in other studio seeds is that we do things, we get a plan, we do it, we implement the policy, we vote on it. It's documented. It's in minutes of meetings, but integrating everything that was my last job. The cam evaluation is assisting hand Zach and his team in getting those drafted for another round of approval by cam governance and this UNC Board.

Kat, what about hold providers accountable? Um, you know that's that's a point where I said, Okay, Cam's doing the job. Housing navigation is doing their job, and gotta get that the housing provider in the game. There's some communities that, at any case, well, you know, when you have a vacancy, right? If you're a provider, and you told Remy, you told hand you have an available housing you need to be at the case consult meeting where you're or be a part of the discussion doesn't sometimes it happens in between meetings, be a part of that discussion. That's why suggesting that we maybe have some standards, you already have firms for housing standards as a COC, but figuring out the housing resources to systematize the mechanism. And if it's complex, because your housing funding funders complex, figuring out ways to streamline that process. Who performs this form, or even if you have a I'm going to say Cindy crane, psh, housing, here are 10 things that have to happen before I can enroll you in my program. And then I need four more things to happen before I can do a residential move in, right? These are key HMIs metrics related length of time homeless. Hold me accountable to those. But I can't just say expect everybody else to bring me the participant, bring me the client, with this perfect packet, this perfect thing. Sometimes I got to be part of that story, and I can't complicate it. So thinking about ways, I think that'd be really good task force to do

to see how to improve that without slashing funding. I said, that's a that's a COC call. I coffee.

I see Zach's hand

yielding to the chair if needed, but I just wanted to jump in here and say to

I want to say all these things with the acknowledgement that there's a lot of providers in the space that are out there being superheroes every day and have a to do list that's longer than my whole body, right? And then they're still coming into these community spaces and collaborating. So I think where what I really pulled out of, what Cindy said, is like trying to get innovative with these consult spaces, and I and I feel bad because I don't know, I don't have a tangible recommendation right this second, but really looking at the consult spaces, how they're structured. You know, what do we need to do to empower folks to be in those combat consult spaces and be present in those spaces in the midst of everything else that's going on, just really trying to be innovative in those spaces and hold each other accountable in the sense that, you know, we're expected to be here, we're expected to be present when we're here. And that might even be a conversation with some of our executive directors, right, like, how can we support your organization to make sure that your team can can empower folks to be in these spaces and be present in these spaces. And so I think caps as for thinking about how to do it without, like, tangible, penalizing folks, maybe we have a conversation like, maybe it's where the conversation is had that we can be innovative with. So I'll maybe just throw that out there as an idea, but I do, I do appreciate you lifting that up in the chat.

Thanks that I was having technical difficulties, so I didn't know if I was, if you could hear me or not, and I do appreciate your comment. In the past, we've done you know, the executive director meetings and maybe some line staff meetings in spaces where separate from the CLC board meetings or call assault meetings, so looking into some of those type of meetings again might be useful and helpful to your point. All

right. And Cindy, awesome job. We appreciate. Appreciate you so much. Thank you for all the wonderful information that you have provided today. I think it's very beneficial and helpful for us all to hear it and to be able to process it some more and come up with some great ideas as we move forward here. And I don't see any other hands. I don't see anything else in the comments. And again, thank you everybody for your questions and participation and providing those on the spot resources that we're utilizing as a system. So thank you for that. All right, Chelsea, can we go back as I know this 405, to the agenda. I death,

yes, the next agenda item

is, I'm sorry say one more time. Chelsea,

I was saying the next agenda item is the COC committee survey.

Okay, perfect.

So I don't see your screen yet, but as many of you all know, if you've been attending the last couple of COC board meetings, we have done some presentations on committee board members, and we, I think, have maybe a few other presenters to go maybe next month, but we wanted to get a survey out, because as a board member, every board member should be participating in some type of committee. And right now, I think we, we've mostly been engaging in a way,

hey, Erica. Oh, wait, do we lose her? It

looks like he just came back. Okay. Are you

I'm going in and out. All right. Can you hear me? Yes, okay. All right, so I don't Okay, there's your screen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, as I was saying, as board members, everybody has, has to be a part of a committee, right? And some as a committee member. And right now, I think board members have either reached out to chairs of board members and try to engage in that way, but what we want to do is just make sure that all board members give us our preference, or give us their preference for committees that they would like to serve on. And I believe Chelsea is going to ask for in the survey your top three preferences, and then as as an EC, as an executive committee, we'll take a look at those and try to place people on the different committees as appropriate, right? So some committees might have might have some standards and may need some type of background in order to serve on that committee. So we want to place people where is most appropriate, and also just make sure that everybody is serving in this capacity. So we'll put out the survey make sure all our board members here present, fill that out. If you can do it before we leave today, that would be great. But if you could fill that out, get it so we can get it, and then we'll be able to make sure that our committees are full for one because some of them have, like seven seats available, or other seats available, that can really be critical to our committees. So again, as board members, we want to make sure that you are participating as a criteria of being a board member, and we want to make sure that we place people accordingly. So I think Chelsea, I'm sorry, did you pop something into the chat here? Yeah, Chelsea has placed.

Oh, okay, sorry, I was gonna say I dropped off the COC committee survey, and also this slide and a list of committees to accommodate that. And please only board members fill this survey out for now. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you. And again, read the slide here, so that if you're thinking about joining a committee, you can see what seats might be of. Available, and if you fit that seat as a board member. So again, like the grievance committee might be looking for seven seats, but there are seven different type of seats that we want to feel the cam governance might be looking for two seats, but you know, one seat is a personal, lived experience, so we definitely just want to make sure that we are going for committees where a the seats are available and B, that we fit those criterias for the seats that are available. All right. Allen, I see your hand.

Yeah. Erica, would it be possible to give an explanation of what exactly a parliamentarian seat is?

Yep. So the parliamentarian seat would be someone who basically, kind of keeps order right in the in our meetings. So this person will make sure that we're following our Robin's Rules of Order. We'll make sure that our motions are being stated, you know, correctly, so it's kind of a keep an order of our meetings here at our at our board meetings

as a brief summary.

Okay, thank you. Do? Mm, hmm.

Also, if it's anything out of line, right, they'll make sure that they step in to correct it. So we are still looking for that. It's not a committee, right? That's more of a seat, but, I mean, it's not a committee. But thank you. Thank you for for your question, we've been looking to feel that as well. All right, so why we asked about emailing Okay, Josie, you emailed that. Thank you to all right, change that to a subcommittee.

I thank you Chelsea, for popping that in. Yes, Tara, thank you. All right. All right, so people should be taking the time to feel that out.

And I know we're leaving this up as we do so, and I'm nervous to click over to my agenda just be just because my my Wi Fi has been so unstable right now. Chelsea, was this the last thing? Or do we have one more thing on there? Yes.

Sorry about that, yes, so this was the last thing on the agenda before the break. However, we do have one more item, the yhcp update by Meredith Bowman, but she did message me saying that it can be pushed to another meeting just in case. So we can include public comments. We'll have enough time for

that, so I was just Okay, keep that decision.

Okay. All right,

thank you. Meredith, I do appreciate that, if we can, and I'm sorry, Chelsea, how long was that presentation?

I think I listed it for 15, but realistically, it's probably more like 20. So happy to jump right into that now. Or we can, you know, save that time for our public comments, and I can update you all on yhdp Another time.

Okay, so let's do this. Do we have any public comments? Let me start there. We have any public comments? Or has anybody messaged you? Kiana,

they have not sent me any messages yet for public comment. Okay. Do Alright, so are you wanting to start the public comment now?

Let's see, yeah, if we started and and see if there's anything. If there's not, then I can give that time to Meredith, and then we can end our meeting. Um, but if there is public comment, I move forward with that. Meredith, okay, and then we'll probably save you next time. But if it's not, then we could utilize our last 15 minutes or so for for your presentation. I.

Alright. So any public comments go ahead. We will open up the public comment. If you have a public comment, you can raise your hand now and be called on or you can just type a comment to me a message in the chat, as Erica mentioned earlier, you have three minutes for public comment, and then there is a host of rules and suggestions for the public comment that are on the screen that we ask you to review. Is there any public comment for today? I

Hey, Erica, we normally don't go this swiftly, but as you all do know, there's another item that potentially could take this space. I do not have anyone that has reached out to me, and I do not see any hands raised at this time, so I am going to fold out public comment for July 7, 2025 and turn it back over to you.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Um, so we'll jump into our YH, dp of j Meredith and let you go ahead and with your presentation. And thank you all for your patience and being flexible with

us. Awesome. Thank you all, Chelsea, did you want me to go ahead and share my screen? Do I have that capability? Let's see. Yes, fabulous. Oh no, no, my internet's, there we go,

blocking. I

All righty, Can everyone say that? Okay?

Yeah, yes,

beautiful. So as was mentioned, hi everyone. My name is Meredith Bachman. I use sheher pronouns, and I'm the youth homelessness coordinator at hand, and I will be joined today by Miss Azaria Terrell, once we get to the portion of our presentation to speak about youth leadership. So let's just go ahead and get right into it. So here's what I'm going to talk to you all about today, give a little refresher on yhdp, because I know it's probably been a while since most of you have engaged with it or these projects. We'll talk to you about the youth leadership, and then we'll sort of take a look at how has it gone locally, what went well, what didn't go well, and what do we what do we want to do moving forward? So first our refresher, what is yhdp? So as Amanda mentioned at the very top of our meeting, YTP stands for the youth homelessness demonstration program, which is really two things. It's it's a funding opportunity, and it is a community process. So yes, you get this money to create new projects, which is fantastic. But there's also this whole period of community planning and creation of what, in yhdp lingo, we call a CCP, or coordinated community plan to end youth homelessness in Detroit. So it's the funding, and it's the process and the planning, which I can share our CCP with anyone who may be interested. So a little more info. So it is a HUD funding opportunity, and it was really designed to reduce the number of young people experiencing homelessness everywhere across the US, so yhgp, I'll show you a map in a second. There are rural, suburban, urban communities that all have yhgp, and the idea was to kind of hand the reins over to the communities so that they could coordinate themselves. Decide for themselves, what's going to work best here? What are our needs? Where are we seeing gaps, and what do we want to do? So ysgp first started in 2016 and there have been eight rounds since then, and it is very much youth and young adult led that is kind of at the center of all. Things yhdp, in fact, to even apply for the funding, you have to have a Yab or a Youth Action Board involved from the jump from the application. You really have to have those young people with you, sort of CO leading, as I mentioned, the CCP. That is a huge, huge component of it, the discussions, the planning, the writing of this, of this planet, and then the organizing and ultimately implementing with the yhdp projects, and then yhgp is really cool, because there are a lot of sort of special things you can do. And as far as HUD funding goes, it is pretty radical. So it's a chance to kind of test some new things, and an opportunity to really make the whole COC more effective, more equitable and more sustainable. So here's a map like I promised this. This map of where is yhtp, you can see it's pretty much all over. And I did you see us down here? We were this round four or five that kind of got combined with COVID. And you can also see here the state of Michigan is pretty well covered, which is really great. And I really kind of do see Michigan emerging as a leader in the youth homelessness space, which is very cool. And so here is the vision to end youth homelessness. This is what was published in our CCP, and this was written by our young people, so I do want to read it to you. Our shared mission and vision is for youth and young adult voices to be centered and elevated in our collective efforts toward building an equitable and inclusive community where youth and young adults, all backgrounds, have access to safe, stable and affordable housing, supportive services that use a community coordinated response to offer educational and employment opportunities, spreading awareness and resources through building permanent connections and any other resources and services that ensure youth homelessness is rare, brief and non recurring. So you can see it's a pretty sweeping mission and vision to end youth homelessness here in Detroit. So this slide shows you the sort of high level goals of our CCP. So I talked about that coordinated community plan. It's an awesome document. I can share it with you all, but when you get down to the end of it, we have these six goal areas and and here they are. So the first of course is prevention. We want to prevent youth and young adults from entering the homeless response system and experiencing that trauma of homelessness in the first place. We want to make sure that we're identifying the youth who do because we also know like youth homelessness can look a little bit different, and we need to be ID ing those young people if we're going to get them connected to safe, stable, sustainable housing. We also know for them to maintain that they need access to education and employment resources to ultimately remain housed, be sustainable in that and then improve their health and well being. So our CCP is sort of organized around these goals and list various actions and objectives under each of these kind of big six, if you will. And so part of the CCP development, some of you probably participated in it. Katie Giza did a fabulous job leading it. And there were many, many, I think it was 19 listening sessions that they did, or like, focus groups with young people. And these were the themes that really came out of those discussions. And it didn't really matter, like, what the focus group was supposed to be focused on, like it was if it was supposed to just be talking about housing needs or transportation needs, really. These were the themes that really bubbled up across all of our listening sessions. And I know I like to keep this slide handy, you know, if I'm ever sort of lost as a compass, if you will, these are sort of our guiding themes, and really what we're striving for and everything that we do with yhtp And so what? What were our projects? So here you can see our budgets and our projects that were designed. They're sort of broken down into the the first ones listed are those infrastructure. Projects, and the bottom half are the programming. So yhdp did come with a planning grant that was sort of earlier on, on the front end for all of that CCP and ramp up work. Most of that grant was used to compensate our youth leaders for their involvement. We also have an HMIs grant. We have a coordinated entry grant, which they classify as infrastructure here, that is with community and home supports, or CHS is our sub recipient for that one. There's also a permanent supportive housing project at the Ruth Ellis center. This one's really unique, because you do not need to establish chronicity for this one, it is a scattered site project. We also have a thrh project. So that was another sort of type, I guess, that Amanda was talking about at the beginning of the meeting. This is a joint component. You can also hear it called, and we actually have two sub recipients operating this grant, MCHS, family of services being one and the Detroit Phoenix center being the other. And then finally, we have our crisis mental health grant, and that is also at MCHS. This is an SSO grant. It's really unique in that we're not providing housing per se, but we're providing the case management, life skills therapy and crisis intervention to help young people maintain their housing or get into housing. And there's really only one other project like it that HUD funded, and it is in Hawaii. Fun fact. So this was our initial award, or that like demonstration kind of period of ygp, and the total was $5.7 million and I also listed the grant terms here. So our housing projects were sort of operating on that grant term. This initial award was for two years, and next we can pop into youth leadership. So I will turn it over to zay. I do also see the chat opening up, so I'm going to take a look at the chat and say, if you're here,

we're ready for you. Thanks. Meredith, hi everyone. Quick introduction. I'm zay Toro. Well, my name is Aria, but I go by say, so I'm gonna the Youth Action Council. We just renamed ourselves. It was initially a small group that worked with the subset of dBc, existing Youth Action Board. I served as president of that action board for about a year or two. I recently just transitioned out of that role. And so, yeah, I was a part of that initial group that transitioned into this COC app. Now YAC, our new group formed originally and transformed into the COC act. We kind of built that process. We did incorporate a lot of ideas from the DPC, yeah, because it was already very successful in its progress, the YAC was involved at every step of the project. In yhdp. We did CCP and did the project design. We were part of sub recipient selection, PMP reviews, problem solving and support. Some of us joined the cyh and worked on CCP implementation. DCTS, the group that we recently did that partnered with point source youth in hand to hold sessions for DCTS. Yeah, sorry, guys, it's a lot

you guys did do so much you forgot about the 27 hour training series that you created for the providers as well. That was a big one. Yeah,

and there's, there's probably many more that I'm missing. Like, I know a lot of us working on the grant in the beginning, when we first started, and that was, like, a real, oh, that was a really, like, it was a good experience for a lot of us to, like, start doing this work in COC. I remember it was something we haven't done before. So, yeah, we've been busy, you guys. Oh, cool. And then we have this slide. And as you guys can see, it's nice little word map that Meredith has created. And this was just some feedback we got from some members on the yacht, some words that basically like, what is yhtp? How has it impacted? You, what does it mean to you? You know, just to describe, like, why, if you means, and to read some of these out, we have Embraceable, we have impactful, enabling, inspiring. I know a few of these are mine. It's definitely been educational and opportunity, like opportunistic and so wholesome. Honestly, I think that's the one I should have added. I don't know if I did, but it was unexpected for me how wholesome the community is to be very welcomed, very safe space, very youth led, very youth focused and just very open to new ideas. So yeah,

awesome. Thank you. Zay, yeah, it's been, it's certainly been a highlight of my role is working with our YAC and watching their leadership and sort of helping them to grow and take on new new roles in our COC. So like I said at the beginning, youth and young adults are really at the center of this and leading it with us, because we would not be as successful as we are without them. Okay, so how do we do? How do we do. We've sort of gotten through our initial demonstration period, and really, yhgp is all about building a youth system, recognizing that youth have different needs. So there is this need for kind of system wide examination and work. And so a lot of really great things have come from that. Now we have a youth By Name List that Lydia helps us manage, and we have this new youth case consult space where we're making sure that our young people are not falling through the cracks. We're making sure those correct referrals are happening, and all of that consult can happen. We've also had the revival of the COC committee on youth homelessness, so perhaps some of you indicated interest in your survey that you just filled out. We do have one seat available, and it's really great. It's actually been a pretty clean space to help staff, because we have the CCP, we kind of have this outline that says, hey, here's what we've already decided as a community that we need and that we want to do. Another really fantastic thing is that this has brought in more resources for young people with these really unique new projects since we started YCP. So back in 2023 we have served 194 youth and young adults, and 64 of their children across all of our projects. So that is, I think that's actually, I did a math around 258 young people who have been served, which is, that's a lot of people who are getting access to services. We are doing a formal evaluation, but our initial feedback that we're getting is that youth are feeling supported and that these projects really are unique. I know we're short on time, but I still want to share a story that demonstrates this. Because we had, we had our transitional housing and rapid rehousing component, and as Amanda mentioned, we don't have a lot of transitional housing in our program, so a lot of young people didn't really know what that meant, and kind of thought that it was just going to be the same as shelter. So we were offering referrals to transitional and people were not so sure, and so very brilliantly, our providers were like, Well, why don't we show them? You know, like, if there's this particular young person who we really think is a fit, like, let's give her a chance to tour the building. And they did. They did just that. They took her out to the cottage, they answered her questions, they sort of told her about the program, and at the end of her visit, she couldn't believe that it was real. She couldn't believe that all of these resources were available, that the program was set up like this, like it was so low barrier. And then it was explained to her that it is this way because young people designed it. And right away, she said, Oh yeah, yeah. That makes so much sense. And then she moved in the next day. So I think that's really cool, that we are kind of getting to do something different, and that it is resonating with the young people that we're serving. How do we do continued? So we're starting with our smiley guy, the things that are going well, and one thing we did was we maintained a strong Yap. We are the Youth Action Council. Here you may also hear these bodies referred to as yabs Youth Action boards. Again, these are a requirement for yhdp, and we've managed to maintain ours, which is cool. Quite unusual actually. We're hearing from a lot of earlier rounds that after the projects were selected, a lot of communities didn't maintain their yacs or yaps, and we have which is super cool and really important, because I think it also helped to really build momentum for people with lived experience of homelessness, system work and kind of creating that space for the leadership. Another positive, all of our renewable grants were renewed, so the planning, we can't renew that anymore. So that one was not but our HMIs, our coordinated entry, our mental health. Thrh and Psh, we're all renewed, and we're operating now sort of in our waiting for contract time. And another thing that's gone well is that I mentioned this earlier. We I think we are starting to provide leadership for yhgp across the state. Katie and I get all kinds of calls from other communities in Michigan about yhgp and even neighboring communities to sort of pick our brains and get some support there. And here's a photo of of some of our YAC members from a direct cash transfer event that we hosted a few weeks ago.

Yes, and it went amazing.

Oh no, there we go. It did go amazing. I'm glad I'm not. Zay was one of our lead facilitators.

Yes, I wish Bree was here. Y'all. She did amazing. She made a fantastic game. The Youth loved it. All the youth came off in Covenant House. I had some personal friends of mine come it was splendid. You guys. I am so excited for DCTS. I've been like, I'm sorry, I'm just, y'all don't know. I'm so excited. I'm so excited.

Yes, thank you for sharing that excitement. I am too. I think DCT work is right in line with the goals of our CCP, and I'm super excited that we're moving forward on that. Okay, so that was the fun stuff. Now, what could we maybe have done a little better? Or what kind of challenges have we seen? So the first one is that we have seen significant challenges with spending and ramping up. I won't sugarcoat it a bit. It was really hard for us to do that. However, I will also say that this is kind of right in line with the national trends with yhgp. And so I pulled some numbers here, just to kind of give a sense of how we're comparing to that national average. So our coordinated entry, we really spent well on that. Our mental health, you can see, is a little lower. Now, this is not exactly an apples to apples comparison, because the 70% national average is looking at all SSOs, there was not a way to take out coordinated entry. And you may remember, there was only one other SSO project like ours. So this may not exactly be a fair comparison. Our thrh A little lower, kind of right on par, and the PSH also kind of right on par. Now this is looking at initial awards. So this was our first award. You know, it takes a lot to ramp up a program. And one big challenge with this that we had was hiring. It was hard to find people to fill these roles, particularly some of those overnight roles can be tough, and we had significant staff turnover, not just in frontline staff, but also in leadership and in finance staff, which did lead to some, you know, corrections, FSRs, being redone, resubmitted, which really sort of slowed us down. And brings me to my next point here, around our administrative challenges that we ran into, so staff turnover, as I named, really caused some slowdowns and challenges and kind of get folks back on boarded. We also have several sub recipients, which is kind of a complicated role, and it was new for pretty much everyone, except for CHS, so they had some experience being a sub recipient, but our other our other agencies, did not, and it's kind of had to learn what that what that means. And there is, you know, this is a federal grant. There is a huge administrative burden in terms of all of the documentation that's required. And we know that another challenge that we had, totally transparently, was hands like our own. Capacity. Yhgp started as Sarah was closing out. That's all that COVID money, the billions of dollars that came through. So they were closing that out while we were trying to start yhgp, and we were also in the middle of the cam transition, so very timely that we had a presentation on cam today too, because Pam was taken on the role as the can lead, and frankly, I came in with no COC experience at all as the as the person sort of in this project. So we had some capacity challenges, and then there were also some challenges with HUD. As we were in the planning stages, the messaging was very much one of this demonstration trying new things. We're here to support you. And then once everything went live, there was a palpable shift to a much more regimented, strict, no, this is how you have to be. And there was also some confusion that came from the TA, which was a trend nationally. YTP is different than standard HUD grants. And so HUD ta had to learn that. We had to learn that sometimes we were getting conflicting messages from ta versus HUD. And again, this was true nationally, and when you ask folks about their ta experience. So that was a challenge. And then we have this uncertainty of our current environment, right? We don't know what project types will be allowed to be funded in the future. You know, we have PSH as one of ours, and that's been named as something in Project 2025 that they don't like. We also know that we're even though our spending was very much on par with all of our other rounds and their first award, we're in a different context now, where there is extra attention being paid to efficiency and spending, and so even though we're tracking, we don't know if it's going to like, what that's going to mean with this new administration, and sort of the way that HUD is changing things on us kind of constantly. So what are we going to do? What are we going to do moving forward? So we are doing an evaluation with Wayne State of our yhdp project, so we'll have some a formal report to share with you all next year. We're also providing more tailored one on one support to our subrecipients. So we kind of started in this cohort having office hours. And then we're not now shifting to a more, you know, one on one model to provide support better, as Amanda mentioned, we'll be using corrective action plans, and we're making changes internally for our own processes in terms of, you know, managing our FSR processing. Those are some very large documents, let me tell you. And then also, as Amanda mentioned, we're going to be doing some more monitoring to really make sure that these projects are are successful. And now I have Katie's question owl, I see some stuff happening in the chat. I don't I just have my slides up, so please feel free to come up mute. I see some announcements happening in the chat. I know we're over. I know we're over our meeting time.

No, but I appreciate it. You guys, the chat was fired up,

so I don't

think you missed too much. I was trying to keep a track on it as well.

But yeah, any any other questions for Meredith?

Okay, not seeing any right now, I think you hit it all on the nail, and it was all great stuff. And we appreciate the work that you all are doing. It's much needed, right? So thank you.

Oh, wait, it looks like it's one question from Dr Thomas. It says, Are your partnerships

solid? Any feedback from them?

Partnerships, which partnerships are we talking

our your sub recipient? Partnerships, CHS, MCHS, DPC, Ruth, Ellis, just wondering how the feedback looks from those folks.

Yeah, I try to keep an open channel of communication with everyone and take whatever, whatever kind of feedback I can get. Generally, I think folks are pretty transparent with me and let. Letting us know, like, what's going on and where do they need more more support. And I think we're kind of figuring it out together. Like, you know, we have some, like, entirely new teams in so we're sort of working on building new relationships in some cases and maintaining in other cases, but also to all, to all of our sub recipients. Give me a call anytime.

Lydia, I know it's late. I'll just quickly add to Dr Thomas's point. We do have meeting spaces among the sub recipients as well, and we've developed relationships that I think are going well. We reach out to each other with questions, we commiserate, and I think this project has been really great for developing that in the youth space, so that we're all kind of on the same page and communicating so within our own little subrecipient group too. I think that it's been a nice,

a nice relationship.

Okay, thank you. I just asked because, of course, you know, I'm in favor of yhdp type projects continuing forever in our COC. And so if you have a solid group of partners and are able to work through challenges that bears well for seeking funding and moving the youth service provider agenda, which is where my heart Lies, right, yes, move that agenda all day long I

Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for putting this together. I see Eleanor is yhdp a different system performance measure outside of the CLC system performance measure?

Yes, we do have some special ones for yhdp. I actually have a full spreadsheet that I can share Eleanor, if you're interested, that lists all of them.

I think if I can also chime in here, and if Eleanor is also talking about like the system performance measures that we have to report to HUD, why HDP projects are included in those measures as well. To clarify the PSH project, the, I guess the joint component project, because the SPMs are just housing projects, wonder where the joint component All right, joint component projects are, are stumping me right now, and it's too late in the day, but essentially, yes, yeah, they're included in our SPMs.

Like I answered your question. Eleanor, yes. All right, all right. I'm not hearing or seeing anyone else with a hand up at this time. So again, thank you so much. Meredith for the presentation. We appreciate it. Much needed work. Keep it going. Thank you all for participating. Please remember to Chelsea, just drop in the chat. We do have a feedback survey. This is pretty new for us, but it's something that as a EC we are trying to take a look at so please, please fill it out. It's dropped in the chat. Thank you all so much for your patience and going over with us a little bit. But I think it was much needed conversation. Great information from all of our presenters today, and we'll see you Monday, August 4. Oh yes, town hall meeting tomorrow. Thank you for that reminder to the Eleanor town hall meeting tomorrow, 10am right?

The town hall meeting is not tomorrow. The town hall meeting is the 15th, at 10am

next week, next Tuesday.

Okay, too early. Yeah,

we were going to land on the eighth, but they had said that there was a conflict, and so, uh, we'll sit we'll send that information out to everybody, but thank you so much.

Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. I appreciate you all. Have a good evening.

Thank you. Bye, bye. You.