Liz Clasen-Kelly
Coordinated Entry Oversight Committee
Executive Director, Men’s Shelter of Charlotte
It has been nearly five years since our community started Coordinated Entry. Coordinated Entry is designed so everyone who experiences homelessness or is at risk of becoming homeless has equal access to housing resources and can be quickly referred for assistance.
When we originally discussed the idea of Coordinated Entry with members of the community, we promised that Coordinated Entry would be the first step to enable systems change.
With the housing crisis growing daily, it can feel like little has changed for the better since we implemented Coordinated Entry. But, it is important to reflect on what has been accomplished in five years, as well as the distance we have yet to travel.
What Coordinated Entry Has Accomplished
- Consistent, Housing-Focused First Conversation: Coordinated Entry at its core means that everyone who reaches out for help from the homeless service system has the same first conversation. With Mecklenburg County Staff stationed at the three major entry points and an equipped street outreach team staffed by local non-profits, our community has a systematic way of meeting people new to homelessness and gathering information. Coordinated Entry is set up to be solution-focused. Those reaching out for services are screened for housing opportunities up front and engaged to explore what resources the household experiencing homelessness might have in order to help resolve their housing crisis. The lack of enough affordable housing and housing resources means that the end result of the first conversation is not always housing. But, Coordinated Entry has the right idea – that from the very beginning – the conversation should be focused on housing.
- Clear Program Guidelines: As part of the process to create Coordinate Entry in the community, each homeless service provider had to clearly list what criteria had to be met for someone to enter their program. While every program had this already, we each had our relationships where we could encourage a specific program to make an exception for a specific client. As part of setting up Coordinated Entry, each program looked at their list of entry requirements and were challenged to see if some requirements were unnecessary, as our community strived to have lower barriers of entry to each program.
- Community-Based Prioritization: Linked to the clear program guidelines, there is now a community prioritization for housing programs, particularly for Permanent Supportive Housing. Prioritization is determined by who is the evaluated as most vulnerable, not who is most likely to succeed in a program.
- Data Sharing: Coordinated Entry was our community’s first step into sharing data across programs. Five years later, we now have a system in which basic elements of a client’s story and engagement can be viewed across programs, improving coordination and decreasing the number of times a client needs to answer personal questions.
SO, WHAT
While we celebrate what changes have been made to operate more like one system, designed to help people overcome homelessness, there is still work to be done. Below are two ways we can continue the work we have started and serve the needs of those in our community.
Mining our Data: Despite the vast amount of data that is gathered from Coordinated Entry, we have only scratched the surface of learning from the data we have. What gaps do we see on the front-end of our system? Do people connect with the services to which they are referred? Can we predict who will quickly “self-resolve” homelessness or who will become chronically homeless? It is vital we remain curious about our issues and continue to use data to learn.
Listening to the Data to Create More Resources: What Coordinated Entry staff feel each day serving on front line is that there are simply not enough housing resources. We have the data to back up the lack of housing resources. It is critical that we use our data to aggressively grow resources to meet the needs of our community and rise to meet the housing needs of individuals who participate in Coordinated Entry in their moment of crisis.
This post is authored by Liz Clasen-Kelly who serves on the Coordinated Entry Oversight Committee in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
The committee includes Rebecca Pfeiffer (City of Charlotte), Courtney Morton (Mecklenburg County), Pam Jefsen (Supportive Housing Communities), Trish Hobson (The Relatives), Adelaide Belk (United Way of Central Carolinas) and Harold Rice (Community Link).
