The Alliance’s Capacity Building Team will be on the road in 2018 to help providers implement rapid re-housing best practices and to ramp up their efforts to end homelessness.
Albany, GA: home of Ray Charles, mouth-watering grilled fish… and the kickoff for a year of Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) Learning Collaboratives.
Through these collaboratives, the Alliance’s Center for Capacity Building brings together experienced service providers and national experts to examine current practices, re-work procedures, and set bold goals. The region-wide goals focus on reducing time spent homeless, increasing exits to permanent housing, and incorporating Housing First principles into their programming.
Georgia on Our Mind
On a warm December morning, RRH providers from across southern Georgia gathered in Albany to brainstorm ways to make their work even better, with a focus on increasing flow from their homeless system into housing.
In Southern Georgia, these providers had helped 66 households move into permanent housing in an average of 19 days after they entered the program (between July and Sept 2017). After examining their outcomes, participants broke into three teams to explore ways to decrease lengths of stay, increase exits to permanent housing, and limit returns to homelessness.
Out of this process, the providers set bold benchmarks that they committed to achieve in the next 100 days:
- Increase landlord partners by 25%
- Maintain the fast pace of connection to permanent housing
- Increase the number of people served—so that 100 households can move into permanent housing
Headed North
From Albany, we took the scenic route north through peach orchards and peanut farms to metro Atlanta. There, we met with providers who had recently rapidly re-housed 76 households in an average of 52 days after they entered the program (between July and Sept. 2017).
After robust brainstorming and debate among the service providers, they committed to the following goals:
- House 110 households
- Decrease to 40 days the time it takes on average to move clients into permanent housing
At the end of the day, each organization walked out with an action plan of 30, 60, and 90-day goals—and specific steps to reach the bold benchmarks they set. The Capacity Building Team will continue to support the work of service providers in Georgia and we look forward to returning in March to check in on progress and set new goals.
Taking the lessons we learned in Georgia, our team is supporting four collaboratives across the state of Maryland. We’ll share some of our insights here on the blog; you can also follow us on social media with the hashtags #GArocksRRH and #MDrocksRRH.
If you’re interested in facilitating a Learning Collaborative in your own region, check out the Alliance’s Learning Collaborative Toolkit. The toolkit explains how to bring this learning model to your community and how to improve your rapid re-housing outcomes with a capacity-building approach.