Frontline staff representing the partnership of about 30 agencies came together in early January 2024 to celebrate the successful conclusion of a recent 100 Day Challenge that set the goal to house 100 families in 100 days.
While in December the effort’s leaders had counted 120 families as being housed during the challenge, a late data entry increased that number by three. In actuality, 123 families were housed between Aug. 28 and Dec. 9, announced Jennifer Reason, Chief Operating Officer of Safe Haven Family Shelter, which co-lead the 100 Day Challenge with United Way of Greater Nashville.
“We are thrilled with the level of community participation, support and energy around the 100 Day Challenge which led to surpassing our housing goal during that time,” Reason said. “We need to use the momentum created to continue to put a community emphasis on collaboration, building sustainable systems and increasing funding and awareness needed to end family homelessness.”
The data also showed an increase in the average monthly housing placement rate — from 26 families per month between January and July of 2023 to about 36 families per month between August and December.
Housing more families was possible due to a focused collaborative effort that improved processes, such as:
- Family providers strengthened the Coordinated Entry (CE) process for families to expedite housing placements. An efficient CE process is designed to quickly identify families experiencing homelessness, assess their needs and refer them to the appropriate agency to alleviate their housing crisis as fast as possible. When community needs are bigger than available resources, CE can help the community prioritize families for housing, reduce duplication of services, and link families with mainstream supports.
- The data quality and overall data process of the By Name List (BNL) was improved to better measure inflow/outflow. The BNL collects data to help assess individuals’ needs. It is updated locally on a monthly basis and allows Nashville providers to know who is currently homeless. There is a security process in place to ensure people who are entered into CE agree which agency providers can review their assessments as they work with them. BNLs help communities understand the inflow, which is the number of people becoming homeless each month, and the outflow from our system. Outflow numbers show how many people moved to permanent housing, have not been located within the past 90 days even after multiple attempts to reach them, or are deceased. Data management is a crucial part of any community collaboration and is provided through Metro’s Office of Homeless Services, a key partner in all local homelessness efforts.
- Frontline staff facilitated information sharing among themselves to accelerate document readiness for families. To be considered document-ready means people have all their IDs, birth certificates and other required documents in place to be able to move into housing once housing becomes available.
- The 100 Day Challenge partners shared resource information across provider agencies. Some case managers said they learned about resources in the community that they had not been aware of prior to this challenge.
- Finally, during the effort, the community established a flexible funding source to expedite the housing process. This became relevant when other move-in costs paying for first month rent, utility and security deposits dried up in the community during this time.
Nashville has almost doubled the pace of monthly housing placements for families during the 100 Day Challenge. The following chart demonstrates how the housing placement rate for families started to consistently improve in comparison to prior years. The improvement seemed to start already in anticipation of the launch of the 100 Day Challenge.
“There is an immediate and urgent opportunity to build on this success and better resource these efforts to sustain these outcomes and reduce family homelessness over time,” Nate French Director of Community Impact for Community Solutions, said.
While I explained the history and meaning of 100 Day Challenge and functional zero in past columns, a quick reminder of their meaning may be warranted.
The 100 Day Challenge is a concept that was introduced in the homelessness sector by a national organization called Community Solutions more than a decade ago. The purpose of a 100 Day Challenge is to set a clear community goal and improve processes within our community approach to ending homelessness for a specific subpopulation.
Community Solutions is leading a national movement called Built for Zero that assists more than 100 localities including Nashville to reach what is called functional zero for subpopulations. Functional zero is a measure that shows that a community is able to house a specific subpopulation — like families, for example — within a reasonable amount of time.
In other words, to maintain functional zero for families over time, our community must have sufficient available and accessible housing and support services to prevent homelessness whenever possible and when not, be able to house families who lose their homes within an average of about 45 days.
At the end of Nashville’s most recent 100 Day Challenge, there were still over 500 families on the By Name List. Safe Haven calculated that with an average of 3.6 individuals per family, Nashville had an estimated 1,800 individuals on its Family BNL in early December. The Family BNL, however, does not include every family that’s recorded by the school system, which means that longer-term strategies need to be more comprehensive to ensure increased family stability.
The vision is for Nashville partners to build on the past 100 days and outline a path with clear goals of how our community intends to reach functional zero, so that family homelessness becomes a rare, brief, and non-recurring experience.
For information how to support this ongoing effort to house Nashville families visit 100DayNashville.org.