Homeless Alliance Prepared for Lift Off

By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston

CoC Development Councilors Lisa Leno, Jimmy Jones, Lyle Mordhorst

If you want to know how the collective effort to respond to area homelessness is going, all you have to do is look at Jimmy Jones's face during a Development Council meeting.

Jones is, of course, the Executive Director of the quasi-governmental Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency (MWVCAA), and one of the generals in the war on poverty.     

The Development Council, an outgrowth of the Mid-Willamette Homeless Initiative, is about to launch the Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance (MWVHA or Alliance), which will bring the power and influence of local governments to bear on a problem that, for far too long, they've ignored and/or relegated to charitable and religious organizations.  Eugene/Springfield and Lane County, by contrast, recognized decades ago that they had important organizational roles and responsibilities to fulfill in responding to area homelessness.

The Development Council consists of the City of Salem, Marion and Polk counties, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Keizer, Monmouth, Independence and the Salem-Keizer School District, as well as the United Way of the Mid-Willamette Valley, the Union Gospel Mission and MWVCAA.  In a few weeks, the government entities on the Council will enter into an inter-governmental agreement under ORS 190 to form the Alliance, which will make it a separate public body.

In addition to being a public body, the Alliance will be Marion and Polk counties' "continuum of care" organization, once it registers as such with HUD (sometime in the next few weeks) and HUD accepts the submission.  At that point, Marion and Polk counties will no longer be part of the geographic area covered by the Rural Oregon Continuum of Care (ROCC).  Marion and Polk counties merged with ROCC in 2011.   

If getting the Alliance off the ground sounds complicated, it really isn't.  The bureaucratic requirements  are tedious, to be sure.  And, so is the wrangling over members' financial contributions.  However, the complicated bit will be walking the talk --  developing strategy based on sound public policy, versus each member voting ad hoc based on his or her personal bias.  Jones readily admits it won't be easy.  "This remains a very fragile process", he says.

Of course, by "process" Jones has more than homeless politics in mind.  "Most of the hard work will be done outside this room", he says.  He is wondering perhaps how he's going to persuade politicians and providers that homelessness can be solved and to make the shift from "my program" to "my community."  How to get them to think about "system performance" and commit to prioritizing housing and services based on objective vulnerability assessments, regardless funding source, and to collecting and sharing high quality data, and letting the data drive decisions.  Hard to believe this community doesn't know these things already, but that's the reality.      

The Development Council January 2020

Shifting from "my program" to "my community" will not be easy.  To quell fears that moving to local control over Continuum of Care (CoC) Program funding would result in a loss of funding, the Development Council promised "legacy" CoC Program grantees that they would continue to be funded for several years post-separation.  The move was characterized as ensuring program stability, but it was clearly a political trade-off.  

In any event, HUD always has the final say in such matters.  The 2019 CoC Program awards have been announced.  Only two agencies  serving Marion and Polk counties were awarded funds.  Total was  about $660K --  ~$323K to Shangri-La and ~$339K to Center for Hope and Safety.  The region should also receive some CoC Program funds to offset the cost to conduct vulnerability assessments and collect homeless information data.  By contrast, agencies serving Lane County were awarded more than $3.5M in 2019, and Clackamas County projects got more than $2.5M.  In addition, because these CoCs are high performers, they will probably receive additional funding on top of what's been announced.  Marion and Polk counties probably will not, because ROCC is a very low performer.

It's been known for a long time that continued participation in ROCC was bad for Marion and Polk counties' homeless.  In 2017, ROCC approved a poorly designed project developed by Salem Interfaith Hospitality Network (SIHN), dba Family Promise, and neglected to take corrective action despite SIHN's failing over a period of years to draw down any of its grant (a total of more than $300K in 2017 and 2018), ensuring SIHN's project would be de-funded in 2019.  In 2018, ROCC effectively eliminated MWVCAA's long-standing rapid rehousing project by giving it an undeserved low score in the review and ranking process (for more about that and 2018 awards, see "News from the Continuum.") (8 February 2019.)  The only good thing to be said about ROCC is that it's set the bar very low for the Alliance, at least for the first few years.  That fact probably will not give Jones much comfort.