"Coordinated Entry" After One Year

Revised: January 2019

 

By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston

Woodburn Service Integration Team

The Mid Willamette Valley Community Action Agency (MWVCAA) and The ARCHES Project "just completed our first year of Coordinated Assessments and referrals for Marion and Polk County."  See here at 6.

At the November meeting of the Woodburn service integration team, Patricia Godsey with WVCH, the local CCO, passed along advice she'd heard at the Statewide Housing Plan roll out, to have homeless/at risk clients assessed by ARCHES' coordinated entry staff.

Asked what being assessed did for the clients -- did it get them on a wait list for housing? or were the assessments mostly data collection for ARCHES? -- Godsey said she didn't know, that someone from ARCHES would need to answer that question.  So, the facilitator turned to Rosa Ramirez, the Resources Coordinator for Marion County, who has been praised for "attending the newly-established Service Integration Team meetings as an integral partner" (see here at 6), and asked her if she could help out.  Ramirez said, "I can't talk about that", indicating she didn't know enough about the coordinated entry program to be able to talk about it.

September Report of the CRP Director

While The ARCHES Project may have a list with some very useful aggregate data, it's just a list unless providers have agreed to rely on it for referrals.  To our knowledge, only one housing provider accepts referrals exclusively from the "Master By Name List" -- the Salem Housing Authority for its Homeless Rental Assistance Program.  So, unless your client is a highly vulnerable, chronically homeless individual, s/he is unlikely to benefit from being assessed.

Does that mean you shouldn't send your medium needs client to be assessed?  No.  It just means you shouldn't do it assuming your client is going to benefit from it. 

The fact is that assessments don't actually benefit most clients -- take the text of the flyer circulated last July (at left), for example.  It doesn't require being "spdatted" to "find out if you're eligible" for ARCHES programs.  That's always been done through ARCHES' "pre-screening" process.  (A little over a year ago,  ARCHES stopped accepting electronic applications, and changed its intake policy to require in-person administration of the VI-SPDAT, available only one day per month in some rural areas.)

Adding to the confusion, MWVCAA uniquely defines CES as "A national HUD mandate to develop a collaborative system for assessment and prioritization to improve the efficiency of homeless services on a community basis."   (No mention of referrals.) (See here at 17.) 

HUD, on the other hand, defines a coordinated entry system as "A centralized or coordinated process designed to coordinate...assessment and...referrals."  (See right.)  

As discussed in a previous blog, this  area lacks a true coordinated entry system (CES) in part because implementation essentially requires participating housing providers to use ServicePoint, which, for various reasons, has been a problem.  To be useful providers must have access to the data, the way doctors have to be able to access medical records.  Imagine trying to treat someone for a medical condition without access to their medical records.  That's largely how homeless services delivery operate in this area.  So while it's been helpful for analysis and planning purposes to have the picture of homelessness that The ARCHES Project staff have been able to develop through data gathering, we have a long way to go before we have a true "no wrong door" approach to homeless services delivery in this area.

See comments on this post at the Salem City Council FB Group.