Essential Elements of Successful Housing First & Rapid Re-Housing Programs – Part 1 & 2:

http://bit.ly/wG0j8B

Essential Elements of Successful Housing First & Rapid Re-Housing Programs – Part 1: bit.ly/wab3dY VIA @naehomelessness on Twitter

Essential Elements Of Successful Housing First & Rapid Re-Housing Programs – Part 2: bit.ly/wubCwv VIA @naehomelessness

Posted Online by NAEH: January 10th of 2012

written by naehblog

This is the first of a two-part series guest written by Iain De Jong.

What makes a housing program good? What is the difference between good housing programs and great housing programs? Which types of housing approaches work best for which populations? Throughout my career I have been investigating these questions, putting them in practice and sharing with others what I have learned – and can prove. I am an evidence-informed practitioner with a penchant for being a skeptical empiricist and I do not embrace hunches and anecdotes. I have come to understand that there are 10 essential elements for a successful rapid re-housing or Housing First program

I love seeing the profound change in people when they make the transition from being homeless to having sustainable housing and life stability. For the past couple of years I have been working with communities around the world to help them establish, evaluate, and tweak their housing programs to achieve better long-term success, use their resources effectively, and never lose sight of their mission (which is to end homelessness, in case you are wondering). Prior to that I spent five years starting and growing a highly successful and very large housing program – and we evaluated and researched what we were doing, learning why certain practices seemed to work and others did not. (I should also point out that I am a nerd to the nth degree and hold a faculty position in the Graduate Planning Programme at York University.) Without further adieu, here are the first 5 of the 10 essential elements for a successful rapid re-housing or Housing First program.

1. Know the population you aim to serve

Housing programs should never attempt to be all things to all people. From explaining your program’s intent to prospective clients, to hiring the best people to provide housing access and support services, it is necessary for you to know who you are intending to serve and why. It is important to make the right program available to the right person at the right time if you want to see your homeless service system optimized (which you can read more about here). Some advice:

* Do NOT have a first come, first served approach to housing services.

* Have a centralized intake process or standardized process across your community (great examples can be found in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio).

* Measure acuity of presenting issues (the Vulnerability Assessment Tool, Vulnerability Index and Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool are all good options) and facilitate access to the right housing program to meet their needs.

* Remember that homelessness for most people is a once-in-a-lifetime event for a very short period of time. Most of those folks will end their own homelessness and aren’t going to need intensive services from your organization. Do not do anything that will prolong their homelessness (for example, employment programs that require people to be homeless in order to participate).

* Rapid re-housing is a specific type of housing intervention. It isn’t just about getting people into housing quickly. It is about supporting individuals or families with a few complex issues in accessing housing and providing the supports necessary for them to integrate into the community and, ultimately, no longer need your supports.

* Housing First is also a specific type of housing intervention. While it is housing first, it is not housing only. This type of housing intervention is for persons who have experienced chronic homelessness and have multiple complex issues. Both Intensive Case Management and Assertive Community Treatment approaches have proven to be effective in support delivery, and require fidelity to the intervention to be successful longer term.

2. Have the right service orientation

The key to having the right service orientation is to meet people where they are at – rather than expecting our clients to conform to our programs. To truly be client-centered we need to check, double-check, and even triple check that we aren’t system-centered or client-directed. If you want to make sure you have the right service orientation:

* Allow clients to make choices – from the type of housing they move into, to the type, frequency, duration and intensity of services;
* Provide supports in vivo – in the client’s natural settings and their home rather than expecting them to come to an office or trying to deliver supports through text messages, phone calls, or email;
* Ensure the service plan is individualized as opposed to “cookie cutter”;
* Remember to avoid coercion and judgment;

* De-link the housing support functions from the tenancy (if they lose their housing they don’t lose their supports);

* Appreciate that neither sobriety nor treatment participation nor medication compliance are preconditions for housing success;

* Exercise harm reduction;

* Help people integrate into their community;

* Teach, model, and support people instead of creating unrealistic expectations or being punitive;

* Appreciate your role is to support housing stability, not to “fix” people;

* Remember that your goal is to be professional, not charitable.

3. There are five sequential and essential components

Delivering your housing program in the right order with the right focus of attention is critically important. The order for maximum success is as follows:

1. Focus on Housing Before Anything Else

2. Create an Individualized Service Plan – After the Person has been Housed

3. Increase Self Awareness

4. Support Achievements in Self Management

5. Allow the Client to Reframe/Rebuild One’s Life and Future

4. Structure and staff the housing team properly

Successful housing programs have comparable team structures and roles:

Team Leader – supervise housing case managers and is dedicated to ensuring fidelity to the program, measuring output and outcomes, and coaching for success

Housing Case Managers – can support clients in various phases of housing stability, and use proactive, objective-based discussions with clients to facilitate change and better housing and life stability.

Housing Locator – specializes in working with landlords and gaining access to housing stock. The best ones understand how rental markets and the business of being a landlord works.

5. Work well with landlords & understand their business

If you are working with landlords in the private market, you first need to appreciate that renting housing is a business. Engage with landlords from a business perspective and demonstrate how your approach can help them make more money. If you go into the discussion looking for landlords with big hearts you may find a few, but you likely won’t get as many units long term or be as successful than if you go into it from a business perspective.

Stay tuned for Part Two of the 10 Essential Elements of Successful Housing First and Rapid Re-Housing programs, which looks at items 6-10 in the list.

Iain De Jong is the President & CEO of OrgCode Consulting, Inc. He has been working with many communities to help them improve their housing programs in advance of HEARTH. He is a frequent and popular speaker at Alliance Conferences. You can see him at the Conference in February in Los Angeles. Iain is also the chief blogger, tweeter and FaceBook persona for OrgCode. Take a look at www.orgcode.com or @orgcode or www.facebook.com/orgcode
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is the second of a two-part series guest written by Iain De Jong. The first part can be found here.

Iain DeJong

This is second half of a two-part blog series on the essential elements of successful Housing First and rapid re-housing programs. In Part One of this two-part blog, I examined the populations to be served, the service orientation, how to work with landlords, the structure of the housing team, and the sequential and essential components of successful housing programs. I conclude with a look at data, home visits, professionalizing the work, support phases, and the things you can anticipate going wrong in the delivery of your housing program.

Without further adieu, essential elements 6 through 10:

6. Use data to drive program improvements

Yes “data” is a four letter word, but that doesn’t make it obscene. It is necessary for performance measurement, which is key to ending homelessness. To make data effective:

* Collect only the information necessary to make informed suggestions on how best to meet the client’s housing needs at the initial intake and assessment. You don’t need every detail about the person’s life. Other salient details will be collected during the delivery of support services.

* Ask yourself “so what?” This requires looking at your data to see what measurable difference your program is really making. Focus on quality of service, not quantity of people served.

* Ask everyone involved in delivering the housing program what data they feel is necessary to collect and analyze.

* Remember that your HMIS is a tool to help you with data, but it is not your performance management system.

* Use the data you collect in many different places: website, newsletters, staff meetings, client reception, hiring practices, etc. to make it worth the time and effort to collect and to make transparent and defensible program improvements based upon data.

* Set aside time in the day for frontline staff to input their data; don’t reinforce the idea that data collection and entry is something that happens when the “real work” is done.

* Have a meaningful data analysis plan set up in advance.

* Guide the work through a coherent logic model, where everyone within the organization understands inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes.

* Set meaningful goals to gauge progress towards the mission. Targets should not be an aspiration – they should be operationally possible.

* Increase knowledge about the importance of data within your organization. (Click any of these to read more about data and performance measurement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

7. Use objective-based home visits to facilitate change and improve community integration

The service plan is centered on the individual and customized to their needs. It is their plan, not the support workers.

However, it remains the job of the case manager to help facilitate greater housing and life stability. The key is to have three pre-determined objectives for each interaction with clients that are focused on existing goals within the individualized service plan (aka case plan) and the projected outcomes of the service plan. These are established during a weekly case review where there is a briefing on the progress being achieved with each consumer of your housing program. These pre-determined objectives for each home visit will continue to drive the interaction towards positive change.

Emphasis should be placed on objectives that help create opportunities for the clients to engage in meaningful daily activities. This decreases social isolation. It also creates an environment where they can better integrate into the broader community (not just with other economically poor or formerly homeless folks) and experience greater fulfillment emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, socially, recreationally, etc.

8. Plan for success through support phases

Once people exit homelessness into housing – regardless of whether it is a rapid re-housing or Housing First intervention – we must appreciate the progression of the client in working towards greater housing and life stability. For many, from a psychological perspective, they have adapted to their state of homelessness such that it has become “normal” and while having housing is seen as desirable by the individual, the experience of being housed is, in fact, “abnormal” after years of homelessness, institutional living, incarceration, etc.

In the Formative Phase, it is reasonable to expect greater unpredictability from the client, a range of emotions, an eagerness to be successful matched with a range of questions and adaptations to having a place. How the client is supported in this phase sets the expectations for the other phases.

In the Normative Phase, we see greater progression in articulating and achieving goals in the individualized service plan, greater awareness and adaptation to the community at large, increased participation in activities outside of the home, and increased social awareness. Supporting the client in this phase is contingent upon a range of case management skill sets, and a strong focus on brokering and advocating for access to additional resources to meet needs and increase community integration.

In the Integrative Phase, the client is able to demonstrate considerably increased independence. Some clients will always need some degree of support. However, as clients get to this stage, they have demonstrated mastery of a range of skills and activities that are fully within their life domain and do not require support or intervention on the part of the case manager. Supporting the client in this phase is positively reinforcing all that has been achieved; in some instances, even exit planning after community integration has proven to be successful.

9. It is professional work

Success isn’t an accident with housing programs. Professionally-trained staff yields professional results and better outcomes. It is critical that organizations value training, create a training agenda, create time for staff to develop professionally, and employ trainers who share the values of the organization and its vision to end homelessness.

We also need to pay staff who deliver successful housing programs professional wages. How we remunerate people says quite a bit about how much we value their expertise and the outcomes they are able to achieve in working effectively with people.

10. Things will go wrong…it’s how you respond that matters

I have never seen or created a perfect housing program. I have seen some amazing ones and I share promising practices whenever I have the chance. But the truth is there will be some things that just go wrong despite our best efforts. I think it is more important to measure our response to these issues than assume that the absence of them occurring is success. These are some of the most frequent things that go wrong that I think we need to pay close attention to:

* Guests/partying – consider encouraging the client to create their own guest policy and put it within the context of how they see themselves being a responsible tenant.

* Payment of rent on time and in full – whenever possible, encourage the client to have third party payment of rent so that rent isn’t even a consideration in the budgeting process, much like how many people pay their mortgages through automatic withdrawal.

* Maintaining professional boundaries – as part of training and re-training, ensure that staff know the limits of their involvement with clients.

* Pests – have clients keep an eye out for pests – which are common in multi-unit residential living – and teach them how to inform the landlord when pests are detected.
* Pets – help clients understand lease requirements or local laws related to the number of pets permitted and requirements for care.

* Hoarding – home visits allow for early detection when collecting or hoarding is beginning prior to it increasing to an exceptional size.

* Interpersonal conflict – the client has to understand the role of the support worker, and the support worker has to be prepared to help resolve conflicts.

* Damages – home visits are again the key to early detection of damages, and clients can learn to take responsibility for damages.

Those, in a nutshell, are the 10 essential elements of successful housing programs. Based upon years of practice, research and evaluation, attention to these 10 essential elements will improve the long-term outcomes of your Housing First or rapid re-housing program. Obviously there are other considerations in delivering a housing program, but starting with these 10 and doing them as well as possible will most definitely improve your practice.

Iain De Jong is the President & CEO of OrgCode Consulting, Inc. He has been working with many communities to help them improve their housing programs in advance of HEARTH. He is a frequent and popular speaker at Alliance Conferences. You can see him at the Conference in February in Los Angeles. Iain is also the chief blogger, tweeter and FaceBook persona for OrgCode. Take a look at www.orgcode.com or @orgcode or www.facebook.com/orgcode

http://blog.endhomelessness.org/essential-elements-of-successful-housing-first-and-rapid-re-housing-programs/

Note: Anyone interested in help to create a relevant proposal for what I term a Sanctuary for homeless refugees please feel free to contact me via Email at peter.aztlan@gmail.com ~Che Peta
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Humane-Liberation-Party Blog
http://help-matrix.blogspot.com/

Humane-Liberation-Party Portal
http://help-matrix.ning.com/

@Peta_de_Aztlan Blog
http://peta-de-aztlan.blogspot.com/
On Twitter @Peta_de_Aztlan
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++