Presentations from 2016 National Conference on Ending Homelessness

August 9, 2016  |  Toolkits and Training Materials

PreCon: Rapid Re-Housing 101 for Providers and Community Leaders

Are you trying to implement an effective rapid re-housing model or improve your existing rapid re-housing programs? This interactive session will offer training and tools designed to provide practitioners and community leaders with skills and strategies to successfully understand and implement rapid re-housing as part of a larger, system-wide approach to homelessness. Attendees will learn about the recently released Rapid Re-Housing Performance Benchmarks and Program Standards and learn strategies for effectively implementing the core components of rapid re-housing in their communities.

PreCon: Rapid Re-Housing 101 for Providers and Community Leaders

Have you only recently begun to work in the field of homelessness, or is this your first national conference? If so, this preconference session will provide you a broad overview of data on homelessness, an introduction to the major interventions and their effectiveness, and an overview of the importance of a communitywide, systemic response to homelessness.

What Does it Mean to End Chronic Homelessness in Your Community?

This session will help you define what ending chronic homelessness (CH) would look like in your community. You will learn to determine how many housing units it would require. You also will learn how to set up a system to maintain the end of CH, including outreach, identification, prioritization, and troubleshooting people who go missing, move into the area, or refuse housing.

Accomplishing and Maintaining an End to Veteran Homelessness

In this session, communities will share how they ended veteran homelessness and how they are maintaining an end to homelessness by institutionalizing processes that have led to success. During the session, you will pinpoint steps your community can take to end veteran homelessness. This session also will help you identify when a community should shift focus to preventing homelessness among veterans.

Implementing a Systemic Diversion Strategy to Reduce Homelessness

By assisting individuals and families to identify alternate housing arrangements and connecting them with support, you can divert them from entering your community’s homeless assistance system. During this session, you will learn diversion strategies and how to identify appropriate situations for diversion. This session also will help you develop strategies to fund diversion.

How to Form Continuum of Care Governance that Gets Results

What makes a successful Continuum of Care (CoC)? This session will assist you in evaluating the effectiveness of your CoC governance. It also will help you identify stakeholders you want in your CoC and the importance of a small, neutral group of decision-makers. You will better understand the objectives and authority of these boards and how they can use data to make policy.

Forging and Enhancing Partnerships between the CoC and the Local Workforce Board

Understanding the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) can help you persuade local workforce agencies to work with homeless services. In this session, you will get practical, how-to advice on increasing cooperation between workforce boards and homeless providers. You also will learn about training workforce providers on how to identify and help homeless jobseekers.

A Better Way to Serve Survivors of Domestic Violence

Join us for an honest look at homelessness through the lens of domestic violence. This panel discussion will be led by domestic violence experts who will talk about how coordinated entry, data collection, and referral and assessment processes can be more responsive and sensitive to the needs and rights of domestic violence survivors. Strategies to integrate homeless and domestic violence housing and service interventions at a system level will also be discussed.

Housing As a Platform for Health Care

Being homeless negatively affects people’s health as well as their ability to get well and stay well. This session offers perspectives from an administrator, a health care provider, and a homeless service provider about how improving housing stability improves health. You also will learn how to involve health care providers in homelessness work in your community.

How to Tackle Common Data Issues and Improve Data Quality

Are you looking to improve data quality? This session will help you understand common data quality issues and how you can create and implement improvement plans. You will learn how to validate and clean data, as well as strategies for increasing Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) bed coverage.

How to Tackle Common Data Issues and Improve Data Quality

What works best in reaching out to people experiencing homelessness? What are the core elements in an effective program? This session will examine those questions and also discuss the positive role police can play in outreach and engagement, and how to outreach to people with mental illness or substance use disorders.

Promoting Resiliency and Positive Outcomes for Young Children: What’s the Role of the Homelessness System?

What can you do to support young children? This session offers ideas and examples about services and partnerships that can promote the health, education, and development of these children. We will cover why early childhood education is important for any child, but especially important for the child whose family is homeless.

Strategies for Prevention and Early Intervention in Youth Homelessness

Family intervention and diversion programs are tools to prevent youth homelessness. In this session, you can learn how to effectively use those models. You also will learn about school-based practices and interventions that can help prevent youth homelessness.

System-wide Housing Location

In this session, you will learn the advantages of having a systemic approach to providing all homeless housing location services in your community. You will receive tips on gaining cooperation and efficiencies as well as how to coordinate all of the housing locators on a systemic level.

Engaging Employers in your Community

Getting a job is an important step out of homelessness. In this session, learn how to recruit local employers to help homeless jobseekers with resumes, job interviews, and skills training. What incentives, including tax credits, can you offer those employers? Find out who to approach, and how to approach them, to increase the chances of partnerships.

Implementing the National Housing Trust Fund in Your State

HUD’s National Housing Trust Fund is a new program that will create permanently affordable housing for extremely low-income individuals. The fund is another way you and your state can address the need for low-income housing. During this session, you will learn how to access and use these funds in your state to help homeless individuals and families.

Rapid Re-Housing for Survivors of Domestic Violence

Survivors of domestic violence who are homeless, or at risk of becoming homeless, have unique needs. In this session, you can learn how rapid Re-Housing can be tailored to meet those needs. You also will hear from an expert who has successfully rapidly re-housed domestic abuse survivors.

How to Best Serve Trafficking Survivors

This session will teach homeless system providers how to recognize when their clients might be victims of human trafficking. You will learn how to create a framework for identifying survivors of trafficking and then caring for them. This session will help you to better serve trafficking survivors in your community, including making changes in your system and services.

Partnering with Schools to Prevent and End Family Homelessness

Schools can play a vital role in helping to prevent and end homelessness. During this session, you will learn about a community that successfully coordinates homeless services with its public schools. You will learn how schools can help connect families and youth to the services they need to avoid or escape homelessness, while also helping homeless children and youth remain connected to school.

How to Stop Guessing and Start Knowing: An Introduction to System Performance Measurement

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s seven performance measures were designed to help communities like yours gauge how well you are doing in preventing and ending homelessness. Learn how these HUD measures connect and interact with each other, and the difference between system and program-level measurement.

Best Practices in Rapid Re-Housing Case Management

What are the best practices in case management of Rapid Re-Housing (RRH)? We will review program standards and provide guidance on best practices. You also will learn about how and when to close a case.

Stronger Together: How Funders Can Join Forces to Make a Difference in their Communities

Public, private, and corporate funders can make a big difference in the homeless programs in the community. During this session, we will discuss how funders can join forces and collaborate to have a bigger and more effective impact on homelessness systems. Speakers will share the importance of funder collaboratives, lessons learned from forming partnerships, and strategies for successful cross-sector collaboration. You also will hear from a community that is using new approaches to pooling and distributing funding.

How to Better Target your Permanent Supportive Housing to End Chronic Homelessness

In this session, you will learn how to determine how much of your existing Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) needs to go toward Chronic Homelessness (CH) and how to redirect those resources. You also will learn how to target those units using Coordinated Entry (CE).

Exploring Homelessness Prevention Strategies

Communities can more effectively use scarce resources to prevent homelessness. In this session, you will learn about the research on targeting homelessness prevention services and examine upstream strategies to prevent housing loss. You also will learn about diversion strategies that help the soon-to-be homeless find alternative housing and the programs that can lead to permanent housing.

Engaging Your Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Leaders

Through this session, learn the basics of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a cash assistance program for low-income families and pregnant women. This session will focus on how the funds can be used to prevent homelessness. You also will learn how communities have used TANF dollars to support Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) and other housing programs.

What is the Role of Recovery Housing in a Housing First Approach to Ending Homelessness?

That is recovery housing? Who needs it, and how much do we need? Where does it fit in the overall Housing- First approach to homelessness? How much choice do those in recovery housing get about where they live and which services they receive? In this session, join the discussion about those questions and more.

Employment and Education Opportunities for Youth

Youth experiencing homelessness need housing, but they also need help finding a job and graduating from high school. In this session, you will learn about connecting with local workforce investment boards to access funding for youth employment. You will learn how you can help homeless youth overcome barriers to finishing high school and to accessing higher education.

How to Offer Alternatives to Criminalization of Homelessness

Some cities make it a crime to be homeless. That puts police, hired to fight crime, into the uncomfortable role of rousting homeless people, and it uses resources that might better be used to house people. This session will share how service providers and advocates can combat criminalization of homelessness and keep their communities on the right side of federal law and policy.

How to Offer Alternatives to Criminalization of Homelessness

How can you best use data visualization to tell your program’s story? In this session, you will learn to put your data into a visual context to successfully advocate for your program’s wants and needs.

Documenting Chronic Homelessness

Earlier this year, HUD released a final rule updating the definition and documentation requirements for chronic homelessness. In this spotlight session, HUD staff will provide clarification around recordkeeping requirements associated with the final rule on defining chronically homeless. They also will preview tools that are under development to help provider’s better implement the new definition.

The Role of Drop-in Centers in Ending Veteran Homelessness

Drop-in centers can play a key role in a system-wide response to veteran homelessness. In this session, you will learn how effective partnerships between the Department of Veterans Affairs and community providers can improve system flow. You will take away ideas on how to implement similar changes in your community.

The Changing Landscape of Mental Health Legislation

What Congress does, and does not do, directly affects the mental health funds and programs available to homeless people. In this session, you will learn about changes already enacted as well as pending legislation that impacts mental health services available to homeless people.

Caring for our Aging Homeless Population

The average age of homeless individuals is increasing and more elderly people are becoming homeless. In this session, learn what funds and services are available to homeless elderly people and how to match those services to the needs of individuals. The discussion will include gaining access to assisted living facilities.

Moving to a Low Barrier and Housing Focused Shelter Model

Developing an effective emergency shelter requires housing-focused and low-barrier policies. Through this session, you will learn what policies create barriers for those seeking emergency shelter, the core elements of an effective shelter, and the emergency shelter’s role in the homeless assistance system.

Using Data to Make Funding and Reallocation Decisions

Reallocation and funding decisions are driven by local data on both performance and the populations you serve. This session covers the variety of program-level measures that contribute to overall system performance. You will learn from communities that have used data-informed reallocation and funding.

Access, Assessment, Prioritization, Referral: The Fundamentals of Coordinated Entry

This session will explore the key elements of effective Coordinated Entry (CE). You will learn to evaluate what approach will work best in your community and what changes need to be made for CE to work most effectively. You also will learn to pinpoint concrete steps to take to establish or improve CE.

Funding and Operationalizing Employment Programs within Your CoC

What can you do to help homeless jobseekers find jobs? How can you start an employment program for them? What funding sources can you tap to support such a program? In this session, we will explore these questions and more. You will learn what has worked elsewhere and why it has worked.

How to Make It Work: Medicaid and Financing Supportive Services in PSH Programs

Medicaid and other programs can help pay for services for clients in Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). In this session, you will learn about the opportunities and challenges of Medicaid financing for services in PSH. You also will learn about other possible funding sources, such as hospitals and Managed Care Organizations.

Rapid Re-Housing Rent and Move-In Assistance: How Much is the Right Amount?

How long and how much rental assistance is the right amount in Rapid Re-Housing? How much move-in assistance is best? This session will help you answer those questions and more. We will discuss using the progressive engagement model in rent assistance and identify strategies that have worked in other communities. This session also will provide a brief review of the RRH standards for rent and move-in assistance.

The Federal Budget: What Is Congress Doing to Address Homelessness?

Much of what a homeless care system can do depends on federal funding. Through this session you can determine what current funding levels mean for your program and what increases Congress should provide in fiscal year 2017. This session will provide answers as well as tips on how to advocate and impact critical funding decisions.

Supporting Moving On from PSH

One strategy for decreasing homelessness is to help those currently living in Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). How do you identify people in PSH? How can you provide them access to mainstream housing vouchers? In this session, we will tackle those questions, along with what supports those exiting PSH may require.

Partnering with Veteran Service Organizations to End Veteran Homelessness

Your local Veteran Service Organizations (VSOs) can be your strongest allies in ending homelessness among veterans. In this session, you will learn about the services VSOs commonly provide. You will learn effective outreach strategies for starting partnerships with them and how to sell your local VSOs on such collaborations.

Effective Uses and Targeting of Prevention Resources for Veterans

In this session, presenters will look at prevention and diversion efforts to prevent veteran homelessness. We will discuss how to find the most at-risk veterans. We will provide information on the new prevention screener from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and how to make the best use of the VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF).

Housing and Service Models for Youth

What are the options for homeless youth? This session examines host homes, Transitional Housing (TH), and Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). You will explore when each is an appropriate intervention. We also will discuss service approaches and how they fit within housing models, including voluntary service and low-threshold/barrier approaches.

Addressing Opioid Abuse Among People Experiencing Homelessness

Opioid overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Do you know the laws in your state regarding the use of naloxone to stop an opioid overdose? Do you have a plan for overdose response in your homeless services programs? Does your community offer a needle exchange? This session will address these questions as well as how to bring Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) providers into the discussion with those running homeless housing and employment programs.

Using HMIS for System Management and Performance Improvement

This session will help you use the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) to better understand and serve your clients. You will learn to go beyond HUD’s system performance measures to recognize additional measures that can help improve system performance. You also will learn to use program-level data to create performance-based contracts and performance-improvement plans.

How to Work with Your Public Housing Authority to Secure Mainstream Resources

How can you approach and work with your Public Housing Authority (PHA) to help end homelessness? This session will look at ways to encourage PHAs to create a limited preference, work with wait lists, lower screening barriers, and other ways to partner with homeless assistance providers. This session also will show how to direct PHA vouchers to the most vulnerable, particularly those experiencing Chronic Homelessness.

Capitol Hill Day: Are You Ready?

On Capitol Hill Day, Thursday, July 28, conference attendees will have the opportunity to meet with their congressional offices to advocate for homeless assistance programs. During this session, learn about the Alliance’s policy priorities, how to hold an effective and educational meeting with your state’s congressional offices and how to connect with the group heading to the Hill from your state.

Preparing for the 2017 Point-in-Time Count

The 2017 Point-in-Time (PIT) count is fast approaching. Through this session, you will understand the important role PIT counts play in helping track progress on ending homelessness. You will learn about HUD changes to the 2017 PIT. You also will learn what constitutes a good unsheltered count and the importance of incorporating youth-specific strategies into PIT count planning.

Breaking the Cycle of Criminal Justice Involvement and Homelessness

When it comes to finding housing, homeless individuals with criminal records face special obstacles. This session will cover how to partner with the department of corrections to contribute resources, and work with you to target people cycling between the criminal justice and homeless systems, and how housing works as a platform to end homelessness and recidivism.

Effective Outreach and Crisis Response for Homeless Youth

This session will explore effective outreach for homeless youth, including the role of day centers and peer outreach. You also will learn about ways to increase crisis housing options, including lowering barriers to existing programs and developing host homes.

Ensuring your GPD Program is Most Responsive to the Needs of Your Community

In this session, you will learn how to analyze your community’s housing system needs to determine the best role for your Grants and Per Diem (GPD) Programs. You will learn when it might make sense for a GPD provider to change its program model. We also will talk about including GPD providers and liaisons in communitywide efforts to end veteran homelessness.

Innovative Funding for Rapid Re-Housing

Communities and homeless service providers are finding nontraditional ways to fund Rapid Re-Housing (RRH). In this session, you will hear what those communities are doing and the innovative funding ideas they have developed. You will leave with strategies for leveraging funding in your own community.

Keep, Re-Purpose, or Re-allocate: How to Assess What to Do with Transitional Housing

Communities are having to make difficult decisions regarding their existing transitional housing stock. This session will present questions to consider when making decisions about whether to keep existing transitional housing programs; re-purpose it to crisis housing, permanent supportive housing or other models, or re-allocate those funds. Presenters will discuss the function of various types of transitional housing and how to use community data to evaluate the community’s need for transitional housing for various populations.

A Growing Unsheltered Population: Addressing Encampments

This session provides information about the high number of unsheltered people and homeless encampments in the United States. You will hear the lessons learned in communities that have attempted to address encampments. We also will discuss how those living unsheltered can be successfully transitioned to homeless services and to stable housing.

Harm Reduction is Important Across All Systems

You will learn about harm reduction principles what they are, how they work, why they work and where the nonjudgmental approach is being used to reduce the negative consequences of risky behaviors. The session will look at how the strategy is used above and beyond addiction treatment, and how the principles may be applied to youth, in emergency shelters, and also in Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH).

Solutions for Balance of State CoCs

Learn how to work through challenges in establishing Coordinated Entry (CE) systems across different regions. This session will also teach you how to implement effective and cohesive governance as well as improve system-wide performance in Balance of State CoCs.

Employment: A Key Component in Efforts to End Veteran Homelessness

Employment is key to ending veteran homelessness. In this session, you will learn how to connect veterans to employment resources and to housing, especially Rapid Re-Housing (RRH). We will help you articulate one or more strategies to enhance employment outcomes for the veterans in your housing programs.

Best Practices for serving Veterans with HUD-VASH

HUD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) jointly offer the HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) program. It combines housing vouchers with case management and clinical services through the VA. In this session, you can learn effective case management strategies and how to implement a Housing First strategy for homeless veterans. We also will explore how to collaborate with Public Housing Authorities and the VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program.

Developing an Effective Coordinated Community Response to Youth Homelessness

It takes a community to address youth homelessness. In this session, you will learn who needs to be at the table, particularly mainstream and community funding agencies, and how to get them there. You also will learn about the importance of effective Coordinated Entry (CE) system performance measures in any coordinated response.