Henderson’s homelessness task force will hold a series of focus groups in the next two months as the next step in building a 10-year plan to eliminate the problem.
Among the groups that the city will invite to discuss homelessness are the 10 agencies providing services to the homeless in Vance County, churches, landlords, health care providers, the business community, the disabled community, public safety agencies, county agencies and the homeless themselves. The general public also will get a forum to have its say.
Ten people who met at the Municipal Building on Thursday morning hammered out the arrangements for the focus groups to help fulfill the promise Henderson made in early February when Mayor Clem Seifert announced the effort to create a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness.
Seifert said it’s important not to lose the momentum of the news conference that marked the city’s entry into a process that no municipality as small as Henderson has tried. In North Carolina, only Raleigh and Asheville have completed 10-year plans, and only Shelby is close to Henderson in size.
The mayor doesn’t want the homelessness initiative “to be another city plan of ‘here’s what we want to do’ but never do it.”
Seifert and Martha Are, the state’s homelessness policy specialist, are heading the effort and led Thursday’s meeting.
City Council member Mary Emma Evans, who has made homelessness one of her main issues, also attended the meeting, as did police Lt. Irvin Robinson; mayoral aide Sandra Wilkerson; Vance County United Way head Nancy Gray; Vance, Granville, Franklin, Warren Area Authority official Joel Rice; Vance County Schools representative Jane Fleming; ACTS Executive Director Melvin Green; and concerned citizen Donald Matthews.
The task force is following a 10-step process provided by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness to and has completed three steps: committing to a 10-year plan; identifying the stakeholders; and convening a working group.
“We’re 30 percent of the way there,” Seifert said.
Thursday’s session focused on the next two steps, gathering research and data on homelessness and defining Henderson’s homeless problem.
As part of that process, Are showed the group a breakdown of the point-in-time count of the homeless made in late January. That count, part of a statewide check, found 91 homeless people in Vance County, compared with 69 a year earlier.
The holes in the data may be as significant as the actual numbers, Are said.
For example, of 18 single adult men counted as homeless that day, the surveyors couldn’t determine whether 10 of them were veterans and whether nine of them had been diagnosed with mental illness. Military veterans and the mentally ill have additional options available for services.
Are pointed out that it’s unknown for 16 of those 18 men whether they were fresh out of the criminal justice system, treatment programs or the health care system. Without that information, it’s impossible to know whether such institutions are failing to connect men with needed services and housing when they discharge them.
“We can’t confirm or deny that that needs to be a priority for us,” Are said, adding that the city should encourage agencies to track more information.
Altogether, the point-in-time count found 18 single men and 22 single women in shelters, five mothers with six children in shelters, four single men and eight single women in permanent housing designated for homeless people, and three families totaling 18 people in permanent housing designated for homeless people. Are said that because family shelters often don’t accept men, some of the “single” men in shelters might have been the fathers of families in other shelters.
Under a federal mandate, Are said, the state is implementing a homeless management information system (HMIS) to help service agencies collect and share data. All that will be required to participate are a computer, an Internet connection and an annual user fee expected to be about $750 per staffer using the system.
With 10 homeless service agencies in Vance, Seifert said it might be worthwhile for the city to arrange for all of them to join the HMIS, whether by paying the costs itself or soliciting donations of computer hardware and Internet service.
That involvement would give the city influence over the information collected on the homeless.
Rice said a meeting Tuesday at 2 p.m. at the VGFW Area Authority building on Garnett Street will discuss the value of the state HMIS to local agencies.
Another technological innovation that could enhance the city’s anti-homeless efforts is a rental housing database called SocialServe.com. It’s free to the property owners and the renters; the local government pays for the system.
The database is extremely detailed — instead of just saying a place is handicap-accessible, it will list which of dozens of features make it handicap-accessible — and updated in real time. Renters can find exactly what they need, and landlords can fill properties quickly if they compare favorably in terms of features, upkeep, rent and application fees. The system also produces excellent data, Are said, on what kinds of rental units are available with what features at what prices with what regularity. The system even helps expose fair-housing violations.
“When both databases are up, I think it’s going to be sweet,” Are said, envisioning the HMIS linking someone fresh out of jail or substance-abuse treatment or health care with temporary housing and SocialServe filling the need when the person is ready for permanent housing.
Those are long-term solutions. First, the task force must continue its research.
Are will serve as the facilitator for at least the focus groups involving the homeless and the service providers, and Seifert said she’s the best person to run all of the focus groups. The task force likely will hold two or three focus groups per day to condense the effort, and some of the categories the task force identified Thursday could be combined.
Are said the task force must follow up by applying the SWOT method — assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats — and must keep involving the people who attend the focus groups. She said that’s the best way to ensure as many people as possible buy in to the 10-year plan.
“They’re not likely to sign on for implementation if they weren’t involved in creating the strategies,” Are said.
In addition to holding focus groups in the next two months, the task force agreed that it will hear a two-hour presentation from Are in the next month on the state’s plan, will review the thick plan written by Raleigh and the slim plan from Asheville within six weeks, will develop a picture of the city’s available housing in the next two months, and will begin to communicate with Shelby, which Are said has many of the same issues as Henderson.
“Are we comfortable with this as a plan of attack for now?” Are asked. Getting a chorus of yeses, she added: “We’ll adjust as we need to as we get into it. It gives us a road map for now.”
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