$100K study to look at ‘pain points’ in Pierce County’s homeless programs
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- Pierce County is investing $100,000 to reform its Coordinated Entry system.
- Community input will guide solutions to improve housing referral outcomes.
- Most clients remain on waitlists as housing referrals fall below monthly demand.
A group of consultants and advocates is looking to improve a system that serves as the “front door” to Pierce County’s housing resources for the homeless.
Coordinated Entry is a system required by the The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The county uses the system to record personal information from clients experiencing homelessness before putting them on a list, known as the priority pool.
Clients in the priority pool are referred to different housing programs available in the region, but both service providers and clients have complained about the system as thousands wait in the priority pool for months without information or updates about when they could receive a housing referral.
During a Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness meeting on Aug. 1, Pierce County Human Services supervisor Devon Isakson told coalition members of a project to develop and implement an improvement strategy for the Coordinated Entry system.
The assessment of Coordinated Entry will be done in partnership with the Lived Experience Coalition, an advocacy organization which aims to give those with experience living unhoused a seat at the table. The project will cost roughly $100,000 and is being paid for by funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“This is a project for implementation of changes,” she said during the meeting. “So in the 12-month period of this project we will actually be changing things. We won’t just be producing a report which says, ‘This is what we found’.”
LaMont Green, co-founder of the Lived Experience Coalition, gave a presentation to the coalition about how the Coordinated Entry improvement project will work and what it intends to do.
Green said the effort to identify how Coordinated Entry can be improved will be centered around the community, and the solutions will be “co-designed with the community’s most impacted.”
“We know that those closest to the problem, our frontline providers, advocates, people with lived experience, are closest to the solutions,” he said.
Data specialist Gerrit Nyland is also a part of the Coordinated Entry improvement process. Nyland has worked both with local service providers and the county in the county’s homelessness-response system, helping to develop the county Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness.
The county’s Coordinated Entry system, which Nyland described as a “front door” to the homeless response system, launched in 2016.
“Before Coordinated Entry, if you became homeless in Pierce County, you needed to call up every different service provider and check if they had any openings in their programs,” Gerrit told the coalition. “And that was the case in almost every other community across the country.”
He said the Coordinated Entry system was intended to reduce the “hassle of navigating” the services and resources available to the unhoused.
Nyland said Coordinated Entry incorporates several different programs, including diversion, which makes one-time funding available for flexible solutions to prevent people from becoming homeless, temporary housing, permanent housing, and rapid rehousing.
“One of the big complaints I hear about Coordinated Entry is that, ‘I do Coordinated Entry and I don’t get nothing,’ and that is true for a lot of people,” he told the coalition.
Most people who enter the Coordinated Entry system end up in the priority pool, a list of those waiting for housing resources. Based on personal information given during the intake process, everyone in the priority pool is given a vulnerability score, and those deemed to be more vulnerable are more likely to be referred to housing.
For example, pregnant women would receive a higher vulnerability score and would be more likely to be referred to housing.
During a Pierce County Committee on Homelessness meeting in April 2024, Isakson estimated thousands of people could be waiting in the priority pool. During the same meeting, a Coordinated Entry specialist who helps people navigate the system said there are fewer than 50 housing referral openings a month.
“And that’s, I would say, not a problem with Coordinated Entry, that’s a problem with not having enough funding for the deeper interventions that people need in order to successfully exit homelessness,” Nyland said.
Green told the coalition the Coordinated Entry review group began work near the end of May. As part of the early process of the review, he said the group would schedule focus groups and interviews with providers contracted to do Coordinated Entry work.
He said with group also would be evaluating the vulnerability score assessment tool to identify outcome disparities with who receives housing referrals and who does not.
“We’re just collecting information to find out how the community is feeling about Coordinated Entry,” Green said of the process over the first three months of the project. “What do they see as the pain points?”
After identifying gaps and inefficiencies in the Coordinated Entry system the group will present its findings three to five months from the beginning of the project. By ten months from when it started, the group anticipates implementing the changes to the system.
