HomeMy WebLinkAboutcommunity-notes-home-together-community-meeting-ac-district-3-11-5-25
Home together fund advances home together plan
Today, hearing update from home together plan from AC housing and homelessness services
team
are discussions being held around having to replace HUD EHVs that are expiring in
2026?
- there has been very active planning with housing authority's, and funding has been
identified to support those voucher recipients
Are voices of East and West Oakland neighborhoods included in the planning stages?
- Have a variety of spaces that their system has engagement with
- Racial equity working group + task force → have representatives from folks with lived
experience
- Currently looking for ways to engage community members in forums like this
- have community advisory board and continuum of care committee + youth advisory
board where folks are being represented
Kim & Cathy from Braided Bridge/Homebridge Connect
- Grassroots group working in several AC cities
- Building community is important to them
- Group has people housed + people with lived experience
- Highly value people with lived experience
- Misaligned belief that we are trying to help folks toward independence; we are all
interdependent – stable network of support is objective, not independence
- When we’re in community with people who are unhoused, doing weekly food +
supply dropoffs, they also meet people in other networks who hear about their
work and want to join
- Working to reach people in encampments
- Maintaining personal relationship with folks presently living unhoused and those with
lived experience is critical to the work that we do
- Follow, facilitate, allow people with lived experience to guide them
- Do things like speaking to city council, letters to the editor/politicians about
changes in policy that would assist people they work with
- Hold weekly meeting space + restorative justice space + in-person studio space
- Way of providing stability
- Outreach work - ideal structure/values
- Folks doing outreach: having Lived experience themselves would be helpful
- People who would treat formerly unhoused/unhoused people with dignity and
respect
- People experience issues with service providers – need to make sure that there
is an external complaint/abuse process for those service providers that aren’t
meeting the mark
- Want a funding structure that helps folks with lived experience to lead (start their own
business, etc..)
Johnny O'Brien & Tien Nguyen (Family Bridges,
Inc)
- Every day connecting with seniors +
vulnerable populations; trying to understand
what’s getting in the way (access to health
care, employment)
- Homelessness is not only about housing, it’s
about belonging
- This is where collaboration matters
most
- How frontline teams are bringing trust,
empathy, collaboration on the team
- Co-create solutions with people living unhoused every day (used to be at
emergency shelter)
- For those staff doing work on the ground, they need to be equipped with
empathetic skills and trust with community (trust has been broken in the system)
- Folks in HMIS queue: can be there for 6-24 months and many folks need
IMMEDIATE housing
- Encampment sweeps create cracks in trust
- Hard to find people again when this happens, when their queue is up
- Few questions
- What happens when we help each other face challenges? Choose compassion
over fear?
- Video on townl care cafe: Town Care Cafe
Mark Sinclair, Dignity Village Resident Advisory Board
- Experience w/ homelessness because he contracted long COVID
- Was placed at dignity village and has been there for 2 years
- Wants to stress a couple of things coming from residents:
- Have had provider challenges of their own since being part of the program and
since he was elected to lead the board
- First provider had issues with unlawful behavior
- Second one didn’t have capacity to service the compound
- Current one tries really hard to get people housed, but still some small
issues with weekend feeding and some confusion about small basic
hygiene things with toilet paper (e.g 1x per week folks get toilet paper,
exceptions for emergencies
- If people are motivated to get a job, people want a good meal to start their day
- More oversight from board of supervisors
- Do inspection of facilities, talk to people
- Providers need to be compassionate, flexible, and need to understand people
have different challenges
- Case worker needs to do a lot to get someone housed and resident
themselves need to be willing to show up to receive the support they need
(e.g life skills classes)
- Facilities need resident advisory boards so that they can come together and go to
the city to advocate for residents’ needs
Curious to know what cross-agency efforts may be cooking between AC H&H and food
service providers like Alameda county food bank and meals on wheels? I’m assuming
there’s a lot of cross-collaboration, but curious to know to what extent y’all are in
conversation in relation to the home together plan
- Partner with AC health, ac behavioral health, healthy communities initiatives
- Social service agency partners – deepening connection is part of the planning
Why is the County not deploying funds for mandatory treatment of mental illness and
drug addiction? We have turned our streets into ad hoc mental health and drug addiction
treatment centers because the “harm reduction” model permits people who are ill with
drug addiction or mental illness to refuse or leave treatment. This is not only inefficient,
but cruel because we are letting individuals who are unable to take care of themselves
back to the streets where they often die or suffer needlessly. This contributes to
unhoused numbers in our community. The answer I hear to this question is always
“evidence indicates that mandatory treatment doesn’t work”, but how to we know that
large-scale, focused programs like what used to exist won’t work if refuse to learn from
the lessons learned from those now-closed institutions. Sending people back to the
streets is not humane
- Regardless of whatever you think about harm reduction/agency for people’s health:
Legally, we can’t mandate or force someone (except in 5150 situations)
- Care court has started in alameda county and, again, it is not mandated/forced treatment
but it is adaptive care with folks w/ criminal justice involvement; AC has become noted
for the successful implementation here in comparison to the state
- Want to bring holistic treatment to folks when we meet them (could be narcan, could be
dental, could be something else) so that they get continuum of care
It’s well understood that prevention strategies are incredibly cost effective when it comes
to homelessness. To what degree is this Home Together Fund plan making prevention a
part of the new funding strategy? It looks to me like less than 1% of the 5 year budget for
the funding is being allocated to prevention strategies
- We developed a prevention framework in 2023 we plan to implement:
ACH_Homelessness-Prevention-Framework_021825.pdf
Where are things with establishment of oversight committee?
Is there to be coordination with the "Continuium of Care" program and needs ?
- the workgroups convening to guide the Home Together Plan refresh were identified in
collaboration with the Continuum of Care
Q: any consideration of creating a TAY set-aside as the state has?
- here is a link to our Youth Action Plan, supporting TAY is key to our planning: Youth
Action: A Way Home
-
Will Self-Administered & Semi-Administered Settlements be a part of the Plasn ? Also,
will there be a functional relationship with the CARE Court program in the County (for
behavioral, drug, and substance abuse problems ?
- H&H manages the Behavioral Health Bridge Housing (BHBH) programs which support
CARE Court enrollees. BHBH provide Interim Housing, access to license care homes,
prevention funding for that group.
Comment: as they think through spending dollars – be effective, have metrics, direct this
opportunity at the folks that have been most historically harmed (especially black folks,
newcomers, immigrant communities)
- Focus on accountability + equity is key
- 57% of folks who fall into homelessness each year in AC are black
- Targeted prevention: intend to use important proxies (census data, zip codes, etc) to
identify neighborhoods/communities that are being targeted (especially across racial
lines)
- Homelessness responsive system – built quickly, held together with “shoe-strings”;
sophisticated infrastructure of compliance, accountability have not been there
- Intention: balance necessity of quality + oversight in this effort, regardless of
constraints
FAQs:
https://homelessness.acgov.org/homelessness-assets/docs/FAQ/Home-Together-FAQ-08.19.25.
pdf