The County hired Housing Tools to prepare its Medical Respite Plan for people experiencing homelessness in Butte County, California. The purpose of the Plan is to inform decision making regarding the future of medical respite services, to assist in the prioritization of resources, and to allow for the implementation of medical respite strategies and programs involving multiple stakeholders. The Plan was funded by a County Medical Services Program Local Indigent Care Needs (CMSP-LICN) Project Planning Grant and is a threshold requirement to apply for an Implementation Program Grant. Our team implemented the County’s vision and structure for the Plan including:
- Managing a Steering Committee to oversee the Plan’s development and a Community Coalition of medical, shelter, and service providers to inform the needs assessment. These groups met in a series of six Zoom meetings over the period of February through May 2021;
- Leading quantitative and qualitative data gathering and analysis for the needs assessment;
- Facilitating stakeholder conversations on current services and challenges, potential models, best practices and scope of care; and
- Writing the Plan in a style that is accessible and actionable to implement a Medical Respite Program in the County.
Butte County Medical Respite Plan 8.5.21 File
As part of California’s response to its homelessness crisis and the COVID 19 pandemic, the State provided $600 million in grant funding to local public entities to purchase and rehabilitate housing, including hotels, motels, vacant apartment buildings, and other buildings and convert them into interim or permanent, long-term housing. Housing Tools provided Homekey project application services to the City of Salinas, resulting in an award of $9.2 million to acquire a hotel that will be converted to interim housing within 30 days and converted to permanent supportive housing in its second year.
Housing Tools provided staffing to the Butte County Homeless Continuum of Care in order to manage all aspects of the Point-In-Time (PIT) count and survey, including developing the PIT methodology, training volunteers, and oversight of data entry. We then analyzed the data collected from the surveys and prepared a comprehensive report depicting and explaining the PIT data.
This project was undertaken to prepare the County to apply for the No Place Like Home funding program and to support progress on the community’s efforts to address homelessness. Housing Tools facilitated community workshops and met with County officials to understand the key issues and concerns, analyzed sites to determine their feasibility for supportive housing and provided recommendations to guide the County on future steps to achieve the community’s vision of preventing and decreasing homelessness.
