Community Homelessness Report Summary Brantford-Brant.

Are there particular efforts and/or issues that you would like to highlight for this reporting period related to your community’s work to achieve the Reaching Home minimum requirements? In particular, please describe your community’s efforts to set-up or improve the Coordinated Access governance structure, including processes to ensure that policies and protocols, as approved by the governance group(s), are being implemented across the system as intended to achieve desired results. The community has committed to establishing and maintaining strong governance structures to achieve the Reaching Home directives. Staff support and leadership was extended beyond the original work plan after the COVID-19 induced project delays. Being committed to creating a strong system for the Reaching Home project, the Community Advisory Board (CAB) approved an additional year of service for a Community Development Coordinator. The Community Development Coordinator helps guide the governance groups and facilitates additional connections that need to be made to enhance the Coordinated Access System. In addition to this role, the position of the Homelessness and Housing Stability System Project Coordinator was approved up to the year 2024. This position supports community partners to effectively utilize the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS), and to establish local policies and procedures for systems management. The community has established additional sub-leadership groups to support the development and implementation of the Coordinated Access policies and protocols. This includes a Coordinated Access Advisory Committee and a HIFIS Super-User Group.

Additionally, the Coordinated Access Advisory Committee has set goals to take a systems thinking approach and expand group membership beyond the emergency shelter providers. The goal is that all homeless serving agencies that support clients as they flow through the system of care are included in the work and conversation. The group had identified health providers as a key Coordinated Access priority group. To support early relationship building and systems mapping, a Health & Homeless Workshop was held on April 12, 2021 in collaboration with Grand River Community Healthcare and The City of Brantford. The workshop had attendance from mental health services, crisis services, youth services, Indigenous services, transitional housing, emergency shelters, paramedics, primary care practitioners, the hospital, Indigenous health and wellness providers and The Aids Network. It was innovative step to bridge the emergency shelter agencies and the health care system.

Through the use of HIFIS, the community is able to extract some data in the form of a list relating to the inflow of individuals into our system of care. Data represented in this report includes information extracted on a monthly basis between December 31st to March 31st, and includes unique clients that have a housing history record of homeless within the reporting period (e.g. makeshift / street, emergency shelter, etc.). At this time, this list is not monitored on a regular basis for the purpose of updating client status and monitoring data quality - therefore there are gaps in the information disclosed in this report.

Our community is currently dedicating efforts towards developing a comprehensive By-Name List and associated processes. Once the By-Name List and processes are implemented, our community will be able to report on the remaining metrics defined in the Community Homelessness Report, and to effectively manage and monitor our system of care.