Presentation Minutes


HomeFULLness

  • Cynthia Stewart – League of Women Voters
  • Debrief on the homeFULLness conference
  • Thanks you – many of you were there- you had tables, were speakers or moderators- it was a success
  • Evaluations –
    • All said they learned something – some said they learned a lot
    • All but one said homelessness is an emergency
    • We asked what should people do?
      • Make policy changes
      • Funding for housing
      • Community involvement to make it happen
    • Strategy – Need one single strategy deployed across the County
      • Confirm Shared goals – no clear statement from elected around the county
      • Declare county-wide emergency
      • Defining prevention and adding it to the strategies
      • Need someone in charge -  this group is good, ,Continuum of Care is good, but no one really coordinates on a policy level county-wide – for policy or budget.
      • Public education campaign
      • Database – accessible to many people – in real time – like HMIS
      • Engage the community with problems and solutions
      • Need a volunteer program – brought up by electeds and folks there
      • Big campaign to get more money – for prevention and for housing stock.  And transitional housing.
    • Feedback on the questions Larry asked
      • Best panel was led by two 6 year olds – that kicked off and closed the coordination session.
      • One of the common themes we heard was the desire to move upstream – to reduce homelessness. 
        • Michael Mirra – said you have to understand that homelessness is downstream from everything else in our society – from challenges with health and food and economy – everything leads to homelessness.  That leads us to moving upstream. 
        • We’ll have some ideas on how to act on that in the next couple week.
      • A big thanks to Cynthia and her colleagues (I don’t know who made up the word “colleague”, but they were just throwing vowels in left and right – ed.) – these folks raised over $15,000 and put in an enormous amount of work.
      • I am sending out thank you notes.  Julio Quan was on the planning  committee -35 volunteers – 40+ speakers and moderators.
      • We all know there is a crisis and an emergency.  2 things on the radio as I came in.  The unemployment numbers came down by adding 120k jobs, but 300k folks also went off the unemployment rolls because they were unemployed for too long.
      • James – event was very cool – lots of great speakers. 
      • It was great to have the housing authority and the providers both present.  Would have been great to have private sector there as well.
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