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What do you hope the coalition can accomplish in the second half of 2022?
Group Discussion Summary • Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness • 7.1.22

“Work for long term housing for lowest income and mitigate immediate effects of lack of access to meet basic human needs: we need more small safe sites with awareness of complications around self-management and low barrier need.”

Continue what we are doing so well …

• Continued collaboration and sharing of resources which is of value to providers.
• Continued communication work to address stereotypes around unhoused people.
• Keep pushing resources and housing. So difficult to track and they keep changing.
• Keep building supports between the coalition – getting more information out

Follow through with and/or improve upon current organizing priorities.

• Established policy for inclement weather response, ideally a heat threshold lower than 90 degrees, ideally the same for city and county and based on coalition recommendations. “One size fits all” doesn’t work.
• We have a voice, but how to do we get more influence and impact? For example, inclement weather policy – have not influenced county to ACT. Advocacy resulting in policy changed. Not sitting around waiting
• We’ve have had breakthroughs on safe parking and sanctioned camp sites this year, so keep focusing on building that capacity.
• Safe Sites for All by November 2022 — There will be someplace for everyone to go.
• [Healthcare folks] would like higher awareness of health issues of those living homeless. Hopefully that leads to better access to care.
• Water, toilets, sweeps, strong confrontive advocacy, Emergency Distribution Network completed and enacted.

Other issues the coalition could take up or emphasize more.

• Talk about how various solutions for unhoused each have its own silo, which makes for a very dysfunctional system. We need to push strategies that work together. This requires systems-level thinking.
• Create more engagement opportunities that are an easy starting point for involvement.
• Talk about details of housing development. More about housing on the agenda for the next six months could be educational. Often people who have never built anything have strong opinions about building. Would be interesting to hear from developers and builders.
• Advocate for rent control and expansion of low-income housing.
• One thing that it is missing is good data that can tell us if we are winning/losing the war. We need more, better quality counts than just the Point in Time and HMIS. Leveraging this community to enable quarterly or semi-annual count sweeps could be an avenue to make that possible.
• Mobile toilets—look at creative options for mobile hygiene.
• Need Continued support for social housing options to address outrageous rent hikes that may bring that tidal wave of evictions. It is important to lobby the legislature to address rental issues as well as long term housing support.
• The neighborhood does a treat map for Halloween. Maybe we can compile a water map for access to home spigots?