The most successful efforts to eliminate homelessness happen when a wide array of public and private programs collaborate at the community-level to measure and assess their progress and identify what works best in the community.
To help establish ongoing local assessment and planning efforts, the Montana Continuum of Care and the Montana Department of Health and Human Services are sponsoring a workshop using actual performance data from federally funded programs in our community. These programs include transitional housing, rapid re-housing and permanent supportive housing and while they constitute only a portion of overall homeless resources and programs, they provide a valuable starting point for continued assessment and planning.
The workshop is designed to build an understanding of how data can be used in planning an effective homeless services system in the community. A model and planning exercise are used that is based on years of experience by other successful communities but each community is encouraged to establish its own assessment and planning process using locally adopted measures and standards.
The workshop will be conducted by Katharine Gale, an independent consultant with 20 years of experience in the fields of homelessness and special needs housing providing a variety of services to national and local public and non-profit agencies. Recent projects include research on prevention targeting, development of multi-agency prevention and rapid re-housing systems and facilitating the adoption of system-wide outcome measures for homeless programs.
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