Most days, Ryan Rude starts his morning at the Coalition to End Homelessness resource center in Concord. He often has his 3-year-old daughter with him. She’ll sit on his lap, or at the chair next to him and wave good morning to people as they file in and out of the room while she taps away on her iPad.
Rude, a slender man with tattoos, is a veteran experiencing homelessness in the Concord area. After serving for three years as a combat medic, Rude was medically discharged from the military and returned to the Granite State.
The resource center provides a space where he can visit with his daughter. It is also somewhere where he can get breakfast, take a shower and shave.
It also allows him to meet with case workers who have helped him apply for assistance programs and housing aid. They take notes that explain his background, skills and how he became homeless. They keep records of all of his attempts to find housing.
These individual files are one solution to finding housing for the estimated 125 people like Rude experiencing chronic homelessness in Concord. The tactic is straightforward: know everyone who experiencing homelessness by name. Community Solutions, a national non-profit focused on reducing homelessness nationwide, says the technique is one way to achieve a functional zero – a state where homelessness is not only rare but brief in a community.
Rude’s status as a veteran is important because it opens avenues of assistance that are exclusive to those who served in the military.
After his medical discharge, Rude had an apartment in Laconia until a case of strep throat led to five sick days and getting laid off from his warehouse job. An eviction followed.
“I’ve been sleeping in my car since November. I spent the whole winter in my car,” he said.
His file tracks the services he’s applied for, like emergency rental assistance, housing services through the Community Action Program and housing with Families in Transition. It also notes services he’s looked into through Veterans Affairs.
“I just keep plugging away at it. Something is going to stick eventually,” he said.
A file for Melissa Cleaspy will reveal she has been homeless for six months. But this is her second time living unhoused. It will note that she has three kids and that she has applied for housing assistance with the help of case managers at the coalition.
By developing name-by-name profiles of people experience homelessness in communities, agencies can work together to better track and mitigate housing issues. As the Coalition to End Homelessness is building their own database, the difficulty of finding rental availability is at an apex in a tight housing market for those with and without a current home.
A name-by-name list is a strategy that allows communities to create profiles on each individual – narrating their housing history, health and current housing needs.
In doing so, agencies have the ability to see trends in and out of homelessness and provide tailored housing solutions to those in need, according to Lauren D’Amico, who is a data lead at Community Solutions.
There are several categories when tracking trends in a community within the inflow and outflow of homelessness.
With inflow, some people have become homeless for the first time in their lives, others are homeless after finding housing for a period of time and some people have returned to homelessness from another state or a different community.
On the outflow side, the by-name list tracks housing placements and people moved to an inactive status. People are deemed inactive if they are not in contact with providers in a 90-day period.
Looking at this inflow and outflow data allows communities to track trends in and out of housing – such as how long people stay in placements or how many people are successfully transitioned into long-term housing.
These data points mimic a system already in place by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – the point-in-time count. Each January, HUD conducts a count of each homeless person in a community to track progress on a yearly basis.
The name-by-name list implores the same metrics, with expanded data points, on a monthly basis.
It also allows communities to categorize different populations of people experiencing homelessness – like veterans, chronically homeless people, families and single adults.
The effort has shown success in other areas. In Burlington, Vt., Community Solutions helped create a quality name-by-name-list for both their chronic and veterans populations.
“To have that data available to the localized team and into some sort of collective centralized database that helps the community leaders really get that bird’s-eye view of how things are how the system is producing outcomes for those that are being impacted by their homeless experiences,” said D’Amico.
With the use of name-by-name lists, Community Solutions has helped 14 communities achieve a function zero status for a specific population, like their chronically homeless or veteran groups.
With the recent appointment of Rosanne Haggerty, the CEO and President of Community Solutions, to the Steering Committee for Concord’s Plan to End Homelessness, the city is working to build its own list to address homelessness in locally.
In New Hampshire, Community Solution’s by-name list strategy is being implemented on a state level through the prioritization list.
In order to receive funding through HUD, service providers must have a prioritization list of all people experiencing homelessness. This list serves a mechanism to place people in housing on a basis of vulnerability when opportunities arise.
With the use of the prioritization list, it allows agencies that receive HUD funding and other support systems like churches, to conference when housing options open and successfully place people, said Ellen Groh, the executive director at Concord’s Coalition to End Homelessness.
It also allows providers in the area to collaborate.
“What can we do as a group of agencies to really problem solve and help move this person along, somewhere somehow help them move towards their homelessness,” she said.
Building a database of people experiencing homelessness in Concord starts with individual conversations. Case workers at the Coalition sit down with clients like Rude, asking them about their housing history and personal background. Then this information is entered into the New Hampshire Homeless Management Information System.
This process also comes with its challenges. In May, a new HMIS system went live, which involved a major transition of all data. The switchover included a period where there was not access to the system, which meant an inability to enter data.
With the new system, though, Groh and her team are working to go through and ensure there is an up to date count of the homeless population in Concord. She hopes updating the list will not only allow them to provide tailored services to clients, but also promote a collaboration among service providers.
This includes agencies beyond the sphere of homeless services – it could include partnerships with police officers and medical providers that often interact with people experiencing homelessness.
“It really needs to be a collaborative process,” she said. “Places where people who are struggling with homelessness or are touching the system, but they’re not homeless service provides, having them at the table to help figure out a solution for this person.”