As the federally required annual census of the homeless population gets underway on Sunday in Colorado Springs following a record-high count last year, a new experimental initiative launched community-wide on Tuesday to help reduce the number of people living on the streets.
A homelessness diversion initiative being produced by the local nonprofit ChangeLine and funded with a $500,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs will test whether bypassing the traditional response system and instead using personalized, “out-of-the-box” ideas might work better to more quickly rehouse people who are newly homeless.
The approach focuses on those who have just moved from being at-risk of losing their housing to “I have nowhere to go tonight,” said Angela Roberts, transformation manager for homelessness initiatives at ChangeLine, formerly known as Community Health Partnership.
“If we have intervention and a successful way of connecting someone to housing in that moment, it is powerful,” she said.
Because short-term and long-term housing with support services is in short supply for people leaving homelessness, the typical procedure of being placed on a waiting list for housing can take months to result in an opening.
The diversion model seeks to return people to housing within 30 days.
The gist: train outreach teams, emergency shelter staff and other situational first responders to help facilitate housing solutions that might prove to be more effective in some, but not all, cases.
For the process to work, the stars need to align in a “right time, right place” configuration.
The method relies heavily on reconnecting homeless individuals or families with relatives or friends who might provide temporary or permanent housing for their displaced loved ones, presenters said during Tuesday’s kickoff that about 50 people affiliated with the sector attended.
At a training ChangeLine will present in February, service providers will learn how to effectively engage with people who recently became homeless to learn about their situation, listen actively to their concerns and use a trauma-informed approach to problem-solve options.
“It can be empowering because it’s an individual figuring out, ‘I can do this,’ instead of a caseworker telling them what to do,” Roberts said.
The worker might be the go-between in reconnecting someone with a relative or friend, or helping secure an emergency rent payment, mediate a conversation between a landlord and someone who’s lost their apartment, or negotiate a needed repair to make a unit habitable again, for example.
Diversion is not a program since there are no qualifications or overarching criteria, according to Kira Zylstra, a Tucson-based independent consultant who has been developing the initiative with ChangeLine.
There’s also not an influx of financial assistance for the client, though there may be a temporary boost with a rent payment, for example.
The “careful conversation” is the approach, which has shown success in other communities that have seen not only decreases in their homeless population, Zylastra said, but also declining costs associated with emergency sheltering.
When Pierce County in Washington state tried a two-year diversion initiative from October 2014 to October 2016, 900 families used the technique to be rehoused fairly immediately, according to “Homeless to Housed in a Hurry: Diversion Case Study,” published in April 2018.
Locally, Catholic Charities of Central Colorado, which operates several services including a community soup kitchen and an affordable housing campus for families exiting homelessness, has been deploying diversion principles for a few years.
The organization’s own experimental diversion intervention led 63 people “who were headed to the streets that very night” to pull out of their housing crisis and avoid homelessness, said Corey Almond, vice president of adult services.
Among the lessons learned, he said, is “flexible funds that can be used to assist families in an emergency situation are essential to diversion.”
For example, one young mother who arrived in Colorado Springs with her two kids ended up stranded when she found out that the accommodations she had arranged fell through.
There was nowhere she could go that night because the city’s primary family shelter was full, Almond said.
“We were able to get her a motel room and then a bus ticket to return to family in another state so that she could regroup and start fresh,” he said.
ChangeLine’s pilot, which runs through September, will rely on collaboration between local agencies. The organization will create a toolkit for service providers, establish a data collection system and provide ongoing support for participants, Roberts said.
“Right now, these efforts are very siloed,” she said. “At ChangeLine, we want to make it more efficient and provide the space to learn, listen, implement and track outcomes so it’s not done independently but collectively.”