MWHITF: Meeting 7 - RHY

Revised: December 2018

By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston

[Originally posted under the title, "MWHITF: Meeting 7 - Polk County Calls it Quits."]

Less than half the Task Force was present when Mayor Peterson called the 7th meeting of the Task Force to order last night, with about 20 veteran hangers-on like us in the audience.

Noticeably absent were Commissioner Wheeler, Steve Bobb, Irma Oliveros and Brent Demoe, all of Polk County.  Wheeler was one of the Task Force co-Chairs until she resigned, earlier in the day, taking "the team" with her.  (See Wheeler's memo, below.)  Wheeler and Bobb co-Chaired the Veterans' committee.  Oliveros served on the Support Services/Education committee, and Demoe was a technical advisor who, up until last night, attended meetings with Wheeler.

Both Demoe and Oliveros were initially scheduled to present, but Demoe was removed from the agenda last week shortly after it was published.  Although Oliveros was still on the agenda, she failed to appear.

The Polk County teams decision to cease participating on the Task Force was not announced, and no reason was given for any  absences.

Also absent were Bednarz, Blum, Leith, Moore and Starr.

Late arrivals by Mayor Clark and Jon Reeves allowed the Task Force to approve the minutes of September's meeting, aside from which no action was taken.

The agenda called for a 30-minute presentation on resources for runaway and homeless youth (RHY), followed by a 20-minute Q&A with a RHY panel.  There was no panel per se, rather, the Task Force heard a brief encore of the presentation made to the Public Safety committee about what a local, 12-bed shelter for minors would cost (~$.5M) and what the Task Force could do to help secure the federal grant that could pay for it (letters of support).  See the proposed shelter budget here.

Figures provided at the August meeting of the Public Safety committee showed that HOME Youth and Resource Center, the local day shelter for minors, served 514 individuals last year, 83 of whom self-identified as homeless.  During that same period, HOST saw roughly 30 minors in their day shelter and 50 through street outreach, 30 of whom identified as homeless.  As HOST refers minors to HOME during its hours of operation, their numbers overlap to some unknown degree, as would be true of the 11 Marion or Polk County minors served during the same period by Jackson Street Youth Services in Albany and Corvallis.

Some will recall that NWHS used to run a shelter for minors, but it was closed down three or four years ago, and not solely because they lost their funding source.  Parents and DHS were known to drop off or ignore kids and foster-care runaways staying at the shelter, because they knew the kids were being cared for.  That's why the Public Safety committee was given to understand in August that the number of shelter beds needed here, now, was about 3 to 5, and "triple that number if the community knew and DHS knew [a shelter] was available."

Following the discussion of a shelter for minors, the Task Force heard from the superintendent of Polk County's Central School District.  He spoke at length about the District's collaboration with the County's school-based mental health services, dental and health services for students and their families through the Central Health and Wellness Center, and the Service Integration Teams. 

There was a brief presentation by Jayne Downing of the Center for Hope and Safety, item 3 on the agenda, whose main message seemed to be that the Task Force should not to do anything that might upset the favored position of domestic violence victim service providers, like identifying homeless veterans or the chronically homeless as a "target population."

There was not much in the way of updates from the committees, and no recommendations were put forward.  Asked when the community engagement committee would be ready to report back to the Task Force, Jon Reeves initially said February.  When told that was the Task Force's "last meeting", he replied (with some uncertainty) "January", but he could use some help organizing the responses.  (He actually seemed to think it would still matter by then.)  Finance, senior and reentry housing have been moved from the November and December agendas to January and February, and November and December will focus on committee recommendations.  See "Meeting Matrix" here.

At the very end of the meeting, Commissioner Carlson announced that "we have a group of Willamette MBA students working with the Task Force":   

[T]hey will focus on two areas...they will be looking at what other communities are doing, researching best practices...I have received 1,125 emails...I went through and printed out the reports and I have a stack of paper this high...so we have not had the chance to really thoughtfully digest those and figure out where they fit -- are there just really big things that we are missing in our sub-committees, just because we don't know what we don't know?...I think that is something that will be of great benefit to this group.

Then, once we have completed our strategic plan, the second thing is for them to...help us come up with measurements...we don't want to add a whole bunch of workload to already overworked people on the one hand, but on the other hand we want to be able to say a year out, two years out, five years out, did we make a difference with the things we put in here that we're going to do?  

Mayor Clark also had closing remarks:

I do want to say how gratified I have been over the last several months as we have learned about the various faces of homelessness in our community, that people are becoming less invisible because we're becoming more aware, and if we've done nothing else, we've begun to build that awareness, so I'm proud of the work that we are doing collectively, together to make a difference, one at a time, for people in our community.