FIVE YEAR BLUEPRINT TO HOUSE EVERY CITIZEN OF COLORADO SPRINGS

EVALUATION AND RESEARCH COMPONENTS AND CONFOUNDING VARIABLES

As we move along the five year continuum of the Blueprint we will need a way to record our progress and to continually justify the types of work we are doing. The evaluation and research components can not only help us to measure our progress, but also to record it in such a way as to inspire others, including funders, to assist us in our efforts.

EVALUATION:

At this point our ability to evaluate our progress rests with manual calculation of services, moves from homelessness to transitional housing, from transitional to permanent housing, moves from the streets to temporary or permanent shelter, etc. The implementation of the HUD-mandated Homeless Management Information System should mitigate the present labor intensive model of information gathering and provide a relatively quick overview of progress at any given time. We will also be able to examine more discrete categories of information regarding how we serve the homeless. The same benefits will accrue from our semi-annual homeless headcount, and the ancillary data generated.

In conjunction with gathering base-line data, we need to begin setting systemic as well as intra-agency goals. Combining realistic goals with a crisp evaluation system will enable us to adjust programs in need of improvement, drop those that are not working and direct our resources to those programs that are truly making a difference. We not only want to be able to tell the community that we ARE making a positive difference in the area of homelessness; we want to be able to tell them exactly HOW.

RESEARCH:

There are two areas in our work that are prime for meaningful research work:

1.) A model must be developed to calculate the direct costs of having various categories of homeless on the streets; i.e., what does it cost to ignore the problem? We must include both crisis and chronic homeless, mentally ill and substance abusers. The mix of these categories can be obtained from our homeless headcount data. For these same groups, the cost of a typical program of service must then be calculated using either the two-year HUD model or other accepted time frames for case management. These two components (ignoring and helping) are using taxpayer dollars.

We then need to research the percentages of success that are typical for the service categories chosen.

Next we need to do a two-part calculation:

Finally, we need to ascertain as closely as possible the ancillary effects of helping the homeless, e.g., what is the likelihood that a child of a homeless person will also become homeless and vice versa? This will be more difficult to calculate, but the hypothesis is that successful parents have a greater chance of raising successful kids.

2.) Research needs to be done correlating the amount of money necessary to achieve number one above with the amount of money that is being spent now. The hypothesis is that there IS enough money, but as stated earlier in this Blueprint, it is not being spent in an efficient manner.

We continue to favor (tacitly) treating individuals in a $1000+ per day emergency room situation when we could spend a fraction of that amount in preventative medicine. Can the same be said for rental assistance programs, providing affordable housing in lieu of treating the homeless problem and providing health insurance and day care programs to facilitate parents working? Topics for further research!

This research may well enhance our credibility with funders, who, like us, are dealing with dwindling resources. At he very least, this research activity can aid us in working smarter to help our clients.

CONFOUNDING VARIABLES:

There are any number of events that could mitigate the success of the Five Year Blueprint to House Every Citizen of Colorado Springs. Among them are downward changes in HUD funding, a national economic downturn that would negatively effect the numbers of housing stock, a national economic upturn that would increase rents for our least expensive housing stock, a failure to present a unified approach to accountability in working with the homeless, i.e., if the panhandling and camping issues were not satisfactorily addressed, etc.

We have set an ambitious set of goals for ourselves. We know that the will to work both hard and smart exists among the providers; but still we must be realistic in factoring into our plan those situations that my well be beyond our control.

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