CEA Policy Subcommitee1-26-17 Meeting Summary

Members Present: / Members Absent:
Kira Zylstra
Dusty Olson
Rebecca Stapleton
Sean Walsh
Derek Wentorf
Kate Speltz / Kristine Huson
Amanda Thompkins
Sara Hoffman
Hedda McLendon
Bill Hallerman
Jean Paul / Colleen Echohawk
Wayne Wilson
Sarah Dougherty
Martha Sassorossi
Jeanice Hardy

CEA Updates

  • Band 3 Permeability for Family Programs: The All Home Executive Committee also approved a policy change to expand eligibility for RRH resources to include Band 3 families and to raise Band 2 to include scores up to 10. CEA met with the RRH providers on January 17th to discuss to policy change and are now working with Bitfocus to make the changes to the eligibility engine. CEA will go live with these changes on January 27th.
  • Single Adult Referrals through CEA - We will be holding CE Functionality training for SA PSH service providers (how to process referrals and how to post open units) on February 2nd and 3rd.
  • Single Adult Launch Call: In preparation for launching single adult PSH referrals, CEA is started a weekly call with SA Housing Navigators, outreach teams, and the SHARP team. We discussed the top 100 single adults on the community queue. We anticipate that the top 100 single adults will be the most likely to get referred to housing when we launch so we want to start making contact with these households and working to get them document ready.
  • Changes to Assessments - CEA hasaligned all three versions of the VI-SPDAT (youth, families and single adults) by improving some of the supplemental question language, removing duplicate questions, and adding the new HUD questions to determine Chronic Homeless status. We have hosted six in person trainings for all CEA Assessors to walk through the improvements to the assessments. We also used that time to cover pieces of the assessment where CEA had been seeing some data quality issues. CEA went live with updated versions of the assessments on Jan 20th at 9 a.m.
  • Homeless Young Adult Housing Navigators - The Pro-Youth program is changing and it is now the Homeless Young Adult Housing Navigators program. There are four agencies that have contracts with either King County of the City of Seattle and will be providing these services. The agencies are Youthcare, Friends of Youth, Therapeutic Health Services, and Auburn Youth Resources.

The young adult navigators are a decentralized extension of the CEA RAPs. Contracted staff will provide assessments, navigation assistance, and assist with diversion. The program works with homeless young adults, including young parents, age 17.5 to 24 years old who are eligible for CEA services. The navigator caseloads will consist of unsheltered young adults who are already on the community queue. They will also work with young adults whose first contact with CEA is through a RAP. The RAP will work to connect them to a navigator after assessing them.

King County and the City of Seattle held a launch for the new Homeless Young Adult Housing Navigator program on January 23rd.

CEA Manuals

We are updating and creating new operations manuals to support RAPs and Housing Assessors. These manuals have been posted on the CEA website.

  • Diversion Manual – A CEA Diversion Manual has been finalized to support RAPs use of Diversion funds. Path to Home
  • CEA Operations Manual V3 – We continue to update the Policy and Procedures manual as questions arise and we plan with Single Adult providers.
  • Assessor Manual- A CEA Assessor Manual has been finalized to support assessors in the process of completing VI-SPDATS.
  • Homeless Young Adult Housing Navigator Manual- This manual has been finalized to support Young Adult Housing Navigators in the process of supporting young adults connecting to CEA.

Single Adult and Young Adult Combined Community Queue

Hedda and Sara explained that Bitfocus has informed them that the eligibility engine is not able to create one community queue that include both single adults and young adults for single adult housing resources.

Bitfocus outlined two possible solutions which included maintaining two separate Community Queues and referencing both queues when referring to a Single Adults housing resource or phase out YYA Community Queue and TAY-SPDAT and reassess YYA using the VI-SPDAT.

CEA also proposed a third solution which included Change age bands for TAY-SPDAT and assesse young adults ages 17.5 – 20 using the TAY-SPDAT and 21 + using the VI-SPDAT.

Sara and Hedda explained the body of work that would need to be completed to move forward with any of the proposed ideas.

  • Possible need to reassess clients
  • Change eligibility engine and program set up in Clarity
  • Retrain assessors
  • Concerns about capacity to reassess everyone

The CEA Policy Advisory Committee had questions and requested more information in order to make an informed decision

  • Can we crosswalk the TAY-SPDAT with the VI-SPDAT and see how the scores correlate between the two versions of the assessment?
  • 40% of YYA are in single adult housing. What type of housing are they placed in?
  • What are other communities doing to place YYA into SA housing resource?
  • How are we thinking about YYA in our housing system? We do not want to let tools drive our system.
  • What is the timeline to make a decision?

Hedda and Sara agreed to collect some data that will enhance the discussion

Completing assessments for people with mental illness

Hedda and Sara explained that one of the single adult agencies has concerns that their clients may refuse to complete and assessment or patriciate in CEA due to their mental health. Sara explained that the concern of CEA is that we cannot enter someone into HMIS and put them in the community queue for housing when they have articulated that they do not want to participate. She explained the difference between a client who is stating they want to participate and not be identified in HMIS vs. a client who say they do not want to participate at all. Sara also explained that she has talked to the privacy office at King County as well as other communities that have CE systems to hear how they are working through this concern. She informed the group that she researched 3 other communities and spoke to a staff from CHS and all communities said they continually engagement the individual until they agree to participate. All the other communities stated that they do not put a client into CE without having an ROI signed. Sara was informed that outreach teams, navigators, and case managers may have to engage a client many times before they agree to participate but they do not include them in CE until that time.

The CEA Policy Advisory Committee had feedback and question after hearing the information.

  • If clients are included in CE without their consent, they are likely to turn down a housing resource because they are not ready. We need to engage someone until they agree to participate so we are also successful when offering them housing
  • What is the concern of the mental health agency? Why do they feel that the client has to go into CEA now and not when they are ready and agree to participate?
  • Staff need to build trust and a relationship with the client before approaching them about housing
  • This is not about the assessment tool or the CEA process. This is about engagement and agencies may need to change their approach or processes now that referral come though CEA
  • Allowing one agency to do provisional assessments for their clients creates inequity in the system

Next Meeting:

Thursday February 9th, 2017 10:30 location Chinook

CEA Subcomittee 11/10/16Page 1