NEWS

Learn More About: Nashville-Davidson CountyContinuum of Care

BY JUDITH TACKETT

There is some tremendous news to report in Nashville around funding for the Continuum of Care.

Since 2017, the community has increased federal Continuum of Care funding by 120 percent, from about $3.2 million to $7.04 million for the Fiscal Year 2021 allocation, which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced this month.

But what does this mean? What is the Continuum of Care and what does that look like in Nashville?

When you google the term Continuum of Care (CoC), you will get many different descriptions. Here is what came up for me on the first page, which is on a HUD exchange informational website: “The Continuum of Care (CoC) Program is designed to promote community wide commitment to the goal of ending homelessness; provide funding for efforts by nonprofit providers, and State and local governments to quickly rehouse homeless individuals and families while minimizing the trauma and dislocation caused to homeless individuals, families, and communities by homelessness; promote access to and effect utilization of mainstream programs by homeless individuals and families; and optimize self-sufficiency among individuals and families experiencing homelessness.”

I like to explain that the CoC is three things:

a) A designated geographic area, which in our case is Nashville-Davidson County; b) An organized community effort to build a system that is capable of preventing and ending homelessness for people in a collaborative way; and c) A competitive federal funding stream to support this work.

The $7.04 million in federal funds is focused on the narrowest definition of homelessness, including people sleeping in shelters, on the streets, in cars and in other places not meant for habitation. The funds can be used for permanent housing programs, support services only, the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), transitional housing and safe haven programs (which are being phased out). However, HUD discourages new transitional housing under this funding stream.

What this means is that HUD believes the CoC funds should focus on permanent housing efforts and performance measures through HMIS, a database intended to collect and report on client-level information that provides us with a full picture of what homelessness in Nashville looks like and how effective programs are. You may notice that the CoC funding does not include emergency shelter programs. That’s because the federal government believes there are other funding sources to be used for emergency shelters and also transitional housing.

Remember, the CoC is also tasked with building what we locally term an effective Housing Crisis Resolution System (the feds refer to it as a homeless crisis response system – I prefer to include the terms “housing” and “solution” within any phrase that should describe that our community is focused on ending homelessness for people). When you look at the CoC from the systems-building perspective, it becomes clear that the $7 million in CoC funds will only pay for a small portion of programs within Nashville.

And the federal government shares that opinion. That’s why they require each geographic area that is a designated CoC to have a governance structure. In Davidson County we had a big undertaking in 2018 to create a new governance board called the Nashville-Davidson County Continuum of Care Homelessness Planning Council.

The Homelessness Planning Council is a community board anchored within the Metro government. This Council consists of 25 members; 14 are elected by the general CoC membership, 8 are appointed by the mayor, and 3 are Metro Council representatives appointed by the vice mayor. A Metro ordinance outlines the general duties of the Homelessness Planning Council as:

• Implementing a coordinated and focused approach to ending homelessness and to develop measurable objectives;

• Fulfilling all duties and responsibilities as the governance board for the Nashville-Davidson County Continuum of Care, including compliance with 24 C.F.R. Part 578;

• Holding regular meetings open to the public with published agendas;

• Assuring participation of all stakeholders, including persons experiencing homelessness;

• Maintaining accurate, current data on homeless populations; and

• Educating the public, service providers and other interested parties on issues related to homelessness.

But the true power lies with the CoC general membership, which determines through its governance charter how much power it transfers to the Homelessness Planning Council. One more thing, the Homelessness Planning Council does not have staff or a budget. However, CoC’s general membership determines which organization(s) within the CoC serves as the collaborative applicant and the HMIS lead agency. In Davidson County,

Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) is designated as the collaborative applicant, which applies for the federal CoC grants in collaboration and on behalf of the CoC. The Homeless Impact Division of Metro Social Services is designated as the HMIS Lead agency to administer the CoC’s database on homelessness.

Currently, the Homelessness Planning Council is working on updating its three-year strategic plan. While the first reiteration focused heavily on creating a foundation that is focused on formalizing partnerships, data improvement, evaluation, and communication, I hope to see the next reiteration to include specific, measurable outcomes for different subpopulations (chronic, veterans, families, youth and young adults and other individuals experiencing homelessness).

I believe in systems building and collaboration, which clearly has helped Nashville increase the CoC funds by 120 percent over a four-year period. One of the side effects of great collaboration is that we will, at times, observe tension. But most Nashville agencies have not shied away from working through disagreements and improving results for people experiencing homelessness. This alone is a huge achievement!

The aspects and outcomes of this community work can be difficult to describe — but learning this valuable information is paramount to fixing the problem.