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.