McKee administration doesn't get it
By Steve Ahlquist, UpRiseRI
1.
All records of street
outreach engagement should be documented in HMIS promptly and shared with the
Secretary of Housing’s office on a regular basis;
2.
The Secretary should
be provided with the location of the 80 encampments known to the Coalition;
and,
3.
The “waiting list” as
of December 14, 2022 of all those who are waiting for a shelter bed should be
handed over by the Coalition.
Secretary Saal
indicated that he wants these asks to answered by 4pm on Monday, December 19.
Uprise RI spoke
to Jennifer Barrera, Chief Strategy Officer at the Coalition about
the letter, but first some background about the waiting list…
What Secretary Saal seems to be referring to here is the list generated by the Coordinated Entry System (CES). The CES system was funded by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and providers that receive HUD funding to perform services are required to utilize CES.
The
state’s Continuum of Care regulations require that CES is in
place and used. Outreach workers and providers believe that CES is the best
way to distribute the very limited shelter bed resources in a fair and
equitable way. More about CES is explained in the interview with Jennifer
Barrera below.
Uprise RI: Can you tell me about Secretary Saal’s letter and the Coalition’s response?
Jennifer Barrera: In the fall of 2022, the Coalition
worked with our statewide street outreach providers to conduct an analysis of
all the encampments throughout the state. We wanted to understand where they
were located, what cities and towns and regions, and how many people were in
those encampments. We conducted that analysis, put it together, and distributed
it in September to the Governor’s team and Secretary Saal. They received it in
the Unsheltered Crisis Plan that we wrote for the state
on how to address the current unsheltered crisis at that time.
From the Unsheltered Crisis Plan
Jennifer Barrera: Recently we’ve been asked to provide the
location data and we told them we don’t have it. That’s the way that we protect
our client’s privacy and security – particularly the folks that are
unsheltered. If we have a list somewhere in our database of the location of
every encampment – street address-wise – it is a risk. Our clients are at risk
of physical harm; they’re at risk for their encampment to be vacated by a
request that they move; they’re at risk of their encampments being destroyed,
damaged, or items being stolen.
The street outreach
providers maintain their own individual records, or knowledge of locations and
they don’t share it with anyone because it’s just like you or I: You wouldn’t
want your street address being blasted out to everyone in the State of Rhode
Island if you were at risk. So we’ve told the state that we don’t have the
data.
We have explained at
length why we don’t have location data for the encampments. We’ve explained how
we validated the encampment data at the point in which we collected it. We have
another count, not of encampments but of people, coming up in January with our
annual HUD mandated Point in Time count. That’s scheduled to
happen, we believe it’ll be January 25th, but that’s not a hundred percent
confirmed.
We received Secretary
Saal’s letter today kind of out of the blue. We’ve been having ongoing
conversations around data and street outreach and encampments.