Finding hope in functional zero chronic homelessness achievement
Homelessness is one of the most complex and challenging issues facing our community. As a homeless service provider and resident, it often feels as though our best efforts gain little traction. Every individual and family that experiences homelessness is unique, and finding scalable solutions that help them transition from homelessness into sustainable permanent housing sometimes feels like an insurmountable task. But this month, the news is different.
The Bakersfield-Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative received national recognition, being named among an elite group of just five communities in the country that have achieved and sustained functional zero for chronic homelessness.
This achievement does not mean that there are zero people experiencing homelessness in our community.
“Functional zero” essentially means that, at any given time, fewer than three people in a population are experiencing homelessness. Populations include groups of individuals with a shared characteristic, such as youth, veterans or chronic homelessness. The population we’ve achieved functional zero for, chronic homelessness, is defined as impacting people who live with a documented disability and have experienced homelessness for more than one year, or multiple times over the past three years, which can be verified.
I’ll be the first to admit, no one — myself included — thought functional zero was attainable when we started the journey in 2015. What we’ve learned along the way has not only transformed our current approach to addressing homelessness, but also given us a vision of what is possible.
Our journey toward functional zero picked up momentum when we developed a quality by-name list of individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. This list enabled us to know exactly how many people were experiencing chronic homelessness, track that number as it increased or decreased and understand both how many people were achieving housing and how long it took to find housing for them.
The by-name list has been a system-level change that’s enabled us to focus our energy on serving our most vulnerable clients, assess our impact, identify bottlenecks and implement additional system changes.
Three other innovations we implemented include leveraging technology, case conferencing and flexible funding.
After developing our quality by-name list, our team sought to fully leverage technology resources to work more efficiently and effectively. We use reports to track our outreach efforts, which help ensure we maintain contact with our chronically homeless clients. Daily reports empower our outreach teams to make sure we don’t lose touch with our chronically homeless clients.
During case conferencing, our network of service providers review the individuals on our by-name list, which improves the coordination of services. We have shifted from silos to active collaboration, which has led to group ownership of outcomes for our clients. There is no more “my” or “your” client, but every individual is one of “our” clients. Case conferencing allows us to quickly identify needs and deploy resources from across the continuum of care to help individuals experiencing homelessness achieve and maintain permanent housing.
Lastly, we have been able to leverage flexible grant funding from Kaiser Permanente so our case managers had the resources to cover miscellaneous expenses that often prevent individuals from moving into permanent housing. For example, one of our clients had a $15 application fee we were able to pay for using this grant. In another, we purchased a stove so a client could move into their apartment immediately. Having access to these funds enabled us to rapidly solve small problems that would have presented big challenges to moving individuals from homelessness to permanent housing.
Not everything succeeded as planned, but our team looked for the lessons to learn all along the way. Rather than accepting setbacks as defeat, we chose to fail forward and continuously adapt. I couldn’t be prouder to have been a part of the effort.
Achieving functional zero doesn’t mean that no one in our community will ever experience chronic homelessness again. But, it shows us that we are capable of creating a future where homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring. And, it provides hope that, together, we can build a future where every person has a permanent place to call home.