James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 16:20 Great. So yeah, I see about 25 folks here and I know that it usually trickles up to, to about double that we're gonna do something a little bit different today. For those that don't know me I did change my name to include my agency at the end and I'm going to encourage everyone to change that we're going to do breakout groups later and I'm going to encourage everyone to change their name to include their full name and their agency or some way we can identify each other on our roles that we play in terms of how we're going to help really end homelessness, we did a survey, or actually we did a meeting that included a survey conversation about the people who attend this meeting regularly, what do they most benefit from and what did they most felt like they gained and what do they lost during COVID, and we were really encouraged to look at ways of networking in this meeting differently so we're gonna try some stuff today, we're really focused on getting to know each other, getting to know the landscape of shelter and shelter providers specifically, and then doing some networking and breakout sessions to brainstorm. I think is off though I thought this might be a good opportunity just to take a few 10 seconds or so of silence or reflection we've had a lot going on lately and I feel like with the things happening nationally and today being the 57 year anniversary of the March on Washington that they're doing it again today there's a big event happening in Washington DC and we have Reverend Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King, the third who are going to be keynote speakers now the event is happening Washington in response to what's happening all over the world and the most recent with Jacob Blake and what's happening in Wisconsin so whenever you think and whatever your thoughts are I thought I would just start us off with 10 seconds of of silence, it could be a prayer for peace, or it could just be a moment to let your head settle, but i'm gonna i'm going to put on my little timer here and give us 10 seconds of silence to reflect on some peaceful message either peace for ourselves peace for the nation peace for the world. And then we'll get kicked off, so I'm going to stop talking for 10 seconds and go. All right, nothing I can do to transition this from silence I don't have a bell but if you still need to continue with your silence you can mute me on or turn off your volume. But I do want to honor the time of the shelter providers and what we came to do today. If you've been here long enough, myself and Lewis Lewis Jeez, I was looking at some of Louise, and previously, Melissa moss and the city would get together, typically would have been calling before she was no longer with the city and then most recently Tegan or Erica. We typically have a cold weather shelter meeting sometime in August, that usually went with the five or so of us in the basement of the Market Street building with the feedback being that there's not a lot of extra money for cold weather and what are you guys going to do this year to accommodate. I've been on both sides of the shelter provider and outreach provider and I've seen some amazing things happen when cold weather happens shelter providers I've seen us get super scrappy and super intelligent, I don't want to leave out Martha, I'm sorry Martha who's not here there she used to join us two out of sight, out of mind Martha Shepard was our was our representative for family shelters as well. But we wouldn't we would ask ourselves what more can we do that we're not doing now, that when the cold weather hits. That was the question. And this year we're asking that same question, but we're asking it with the COVID lens, and we're asking it interestingly and differently so I thought, First we would just do a kind of a roundtable of the shelter providers. Just a quick, you know, who are you as a shelter provider Where's your location what population do you serve I sent a survey to all the providers to give them some ideas but I'm going to hand it off to Louise trm to talk about what the trm campus does in about five minutes and then we'll, we'll go round robin and get everyone and then we're going to talk a little bit about what cold weather is going to do to our operations. So Louise. Luis Rivera Zayas 20:34 Good morning. I'm gonna try to do this real quick. I am located at 425 South my way this is our main campus. We have our men's shelter, and our women's shelter now. We serve on accompany adults, both males and females that get that the current capacity. I have to go down from 129 to lay it on the male side, on the original plan for the female side was going to be over 61 with with coffee before we opened we have to reduce it to 36. Right now I'm operating at full capacity on both of them. Ah, that is a current proposed for this winter is to increase with the use of an outside location on the male side, on the female side, increase, but for about 10 bands, not that many because of the carbon restrictions. So that's our for 25 South Africa my way campus. And then I have a family campus, which is a closed campus, and is by referral. What I house normally 36 families, actually. Normally we House about 40 because we've been working in overflow. The whole year. So there is not a particular plant for winter. We do flex as much as we can. And bring in some people above our floor but do that, the fact that is a closed campus. We will, we will be briefing you as we meet every Friday. We serve meals on both campuses, a breakfast at 730 to 815 and dinner is five 5pm to 6pm. We serve lunch on the weekends. From 1230 to 115. We provide showers, laundry, personal hygiene items, case management educational career coaching Rob Huff - MDC 22:49 available addiction recovery, etc. And we also have as our outreach team. We got is divided into we got our regular outreach on our search and rescue. And we operate through the winter and those nights that are very dangerous we just send them out more often. That's about it. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 23:17 Awesome. I think what I would like that we're not gonna have a whole lot of time for questions at least not until the breakout session so Louise if you'd like to drop your email or contact person email in the chat box anyone who has additional specific questions to you. Of course, we do our breakout session if you end up in Louise's group, feel free to pepper him with hundreds of questions. So, to keep us chatting moving along. I'm going to actually have Rob described something that happened last year that we were very excited about during our cold weather conversation we had MVC was working with a group of faith communities to put together cold weather shelter and temporary shelter environments and the first one that I'm aware of was last year I think it was Halloween ish time right around our cold weather conversation, Bethlehem Baptist came online as a overnight shelter and MDC took over the operations of that building so rob you want to describe what's happening there are Rob Huff - MDC 24:15 actually it was, it was in late December that we that we took over managing the Bethlehem Baptist Church shelter. It had been running previously. I think there was a bit of a law, and then restarted right around Christmas actually. And that shelter was as you mentioned part of the process to try to find locations around the city to set up additional temporary shelter and increase capacity. Due to a number of things including what was going on at People's Park during December of last year. So, Bethlehem Baptist Church is at 40 818, Portland Avenue. It's it transitioned along with all the other shelters. When COVID hit into a 24 seven operation. At that time, it also, we slightly had to downsize the number of people who are at the shelter. So currently we serve families single women and couples up to 40 individuals, and generally we're at capacity at all times, there's a potential, you know rotation rotating some people in and out but it's been relatively static. We don't currently have a waitlist. So, that's the current situation. When COVID hit, we changed how we run the operation we spaced everybody out just like all the other shelters and took measures to try to do health checks with, with the guests, and to do temperature checks those kinds of things, and run through some basic COVID and health protocols to keep down the spread of any virus. In terms of the cold weather capacity there. So this is kind of quoting Dr. Jackson, who is the pastor there at Bethlehem Baptist Church, there is capacity, there's space. The challenge is having additional staffing to be able to, to have more people there, and it's not an unlimited amount of space either so. So I would say there's a potential for some expansion with conversation around that James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 26:51 awesome and I would say the same thing, Rob, for personal questions about this out there if you want to drop yourself or whoever is the person who answered the questions I know I emailed Dr. Jackson he said no I don't really I have the building and I do the church stuff but but MDC really runs the operation so yes if you can give us a contact person that would be great agree, as questions come up, and I will get it. Cool. Thank you very much, Rob Huff - MDC 27:16 just one reminder from the chat, Theresa reminding me if folks are speaking. Please go ahead and turn your video on it's very helpful for people to be able to see the face of the person presenting so thank you for that reminder, Teresa. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 27:34 Awesome. You stole my thunder there I was about to hand out to somebody who didn't have their camera on, but I know that Dave Shepard is here to represent the Salvation Army I think he's actually on maternity leave or something became special Just for us so I want to thank you for that and congratulations to you and your, your wife, and thanks for junior camera on but I'm going to hand off to you, David to talk about Salvation Army's family shelter. So we can't hear you very well David that we can hear this a Muslim, but no, no words coming through. Cool why he's figuring that off I'm gonna hand up I think Kindred is gonna represent what the temporary shelter at all timers Memorial, is that correct. Unknown Speaker 28:42 That's correct, and my apologies I'm having problems with the camera on this device which is why it's not on. So, I'm not being, you know defiant, I just I can't get the camera. It's a problem with the, with something with this phone that I'm on. But yes, I am with the gmic family shelter at all time or Memorial Church, we are one of the newer family shelters opened in February, 27 of this year. We are located at 1121 South Alzheimer Street in downtown Tacoma, and we are relatively small our capacity is eight families we cater to families with children up to the age of 17, and we currently have six families right now do two families that have been able to secure their own housing. We don't have a waitlist right now normally we do but we actually don't have a waitlist right now so we've got two rooms available. We do provide three meals a day every day for the families. We also have laundry computer access and we also teach them a finance class, so they can learn about how to better handle their money. And I'm trying to think I was writing down with what you were asking. Since we are new we we did open initially as a 12 hour overnight shelter but of course with COVID. We did have to go 24 hours and the last word I got from Pastor Dexter Clark, is that we will be continuing 24 hours for the foreseeable future. So I believe that was all of the questions that you had sent me so that was pretty quick, but that's us. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 30:30 Right, thank you and then again if you'll drop your contact info or the person that would be the best contact for the shelter if they have questions in the future. I'd appreciate it. Unknown Speaker 30:42 We'll do. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 30:43 Thank you very much. I don't know David jump back on Yes. Unknown Speaker 30:47 Hello, I'm back. Can you hear me now. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 30:50 Yes. Awesome. Unknown Speaker 30:51 Excellent. So I switched to my phone something's going on with the laptop so I am on maternity leave, but I'm taking it intermittently so I'm still in the office every Monday and on Fridays. And we have a new caseworker here now, named Sarah, who's been doing an excellent job. We're really not sure how we want to proceed with our overflow shelter this winter, you know, because with the whole COVID restrictions, it makes it very difficult because we definitely couldn't do the same procedure that we did last time. Right now our shelter is about. We've had to lower capacity as well a little bit so worried about. We've gone from housing 75 Now we try to keep it around 55 to 60 to give everybody a little bit more space, but we've changed up a lot of procedures as far as like the eat me meals and stuff. No longer are they congregating all in the same room. Everybody lines up outside gets their meals and goes back to their room. So we've had to do a whole lot of changes to keep up. But we're still trying to figure out what we're getting what its gonna look like this winter because I know we're definitely gonna have the influx of clients. And then, was there any particular questions that we want to go over. I can give my email and in the chat box. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 32:14 I think that'll work we just sent out a random set of questions just to do kind of a roundtable the best we could to get a brief introduction for those that are new or not knowledgeable about the shelters and knowing that we really only have a handful of shelters that we all know each other but I don't think everyone else knows so that was very helpful. And then dropping your email or the person's contact email would be great. Sure. And then I'm gonna represent two shelters real quick Fatimah Lawrence was the contact for the Catholic news services who got back to us about the services that they offer. She wasn't available today, and she said she'll come next week and give a little bit more of an overview, but Forgive me why I get to my email and read her responses. But the Nativity house shelter is located at 702 South 11th Street and Tacoma. They have been offering 24 hour services since COVID hit over only for those that are spending the night, they do not offer dropping services any longer for people who are not spending the night. They offer meals three times a day. For those that are not sleeping there people can come up and get a, a meal. 830 is breakfast, 11am is lunch. During the week, 930 on the weekends for breakfast and 130 for lunch and then Dinner is served outside at 5pm for the general population. They serve single adults 18 and up, no minors at this location. The current capacity is limited due to covid, the actual capacity right now is Unknown Speaker 33:56 I just skipped it sorry they're James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 34:01 58, women, and 117. I'm sorry, 58 men, and 28 women for a total of 86, they have a total capacity of 117, but they're using hotels for vulnerable guests over 60 or with pre existing conditions, but their capacity, total with the hotel and the campus is 117. They don't know if they can expand due to COVID, unless they expand hotel operations which require additional staff, and they have a name of a person that I'm going for referrals and I'm going to drop in the referral line, whose name is the supervisor Austin Burton. So let me drop that in. If you don't know I don't work for Catholic community services I'm literally reading the email from Fatimah. She says he'll be here next week. And I'm dropping the information for the phone number for Austin Burton in the chat. But I do run a shelter as well at comprehensive life resources we run the youth young adult shelter, located at the beacon, Senior Center on the corner of Fossett and 13th. It's a walk up shelter we do 24 seven services for folks that are 18 to 24. We can't have minor children in the building, minors, or young adults who have children, just singles. We have the capacity with our in our COVID world to serve up to 52 with our six foot distancing. Typically, we don't hit that walk up shelter so nobody's turned away for capacity, and we offer all kinds of stuff during the day three meals a day. We also save meals for people who come late so it's not a problem that somebody is not here during meal times. We have case management therapists, we have a nurse that comes twice a week. The way that we expand typically the last couple of winters hasn't been size, although we can go up to about 60 with our space, we, we typically expand the age. When the Nativity house or my rescue mission hit their mouths and they have a 25 year old or a 26 year old to help alleviate the pressure on the other shelters, we will relinquish our 24 year old number on a case by case basis mostly to alleviate pressure off the other shelters, and we can be willing to do that it's not a fall everybody come who's 25 or 26 but working with the other shelters we try to find ways that people can stay indoors when we can. So that's the gist of beacon I'll put my information in the chat box for everybody. Um, the other shelter update I don't know if maybe Megan's gonna take this or just me I didn't see Paula, or my boyfriend jump on, but I don't see everybody, I'm sorry if Paul or Mike is here, and then I just interrupt me. Please do. Oh Allah, I think it Paul Anderson, are you going to talk about the freezing nights and the drop in center and Puyallup. Rob Huff - MDC 37:03 If you're here. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 37:09 Alright, well I don't know for sure but I guess the big news is for those that don't know most of the time. Starting right around Halloween November 1, there's a ministry of churches and piala freezing nights that puts together cold weather shelter that moves from location to location, they use volunteers from the church and from the community, and they rely a lot on donations in support of these different churches most years. They're pretty close to covering, seven days a week but last year there was no Tuesdays for example I think every other Thursday was not they couldn't find a church site. This year, Maureen Howard 37:45 James. Can you see Rob Huff - MDC 37:47 it all in return. Yeah. Maureen Howard 37:49 Okay. Thanks. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 37:51 Great I'm gonna let Paul I'm not gonna steal her thunder, I just set the table for her, and for the things that happen on piala. Paula Anderson - New Hope 37:59 Okay, great. Um, I don't know if you guys can hear me I'm using it. Here we go. Whoo, okay, I had, I forgot my computer at home, which had all of this on it so I'm using one we have here that's an older one so just to let you guys know, there is no freezing nights this year we have been unable to get enough churches and that's due to COVID people are worried. We understand that completely the churches have literally been doing this ministry for 17 years. So it's been a long time, and we've been so grateful. So right now, um, as far as any kind of overnight shelter. I know that Mike moisture couldn't be here this morning, he is working on some things and that's all I got from him I don't know what that means I, I know in years past, he has tried to talk with the city about warming centers and cooling centers during inclement weather so I don't know if that's something, but right now we're just waiting to hear so, um, in the meantime, what what we're trying to do is that new hope because of COVID we're operating a little bit differently as well. We currently serve between 40 and 60 people per day for lunches and so our, our facility is small in comparison to some of the other bigger shelters and day shelters so we are not allowing people inside the building, other than to use the restroom once at one at a time, or to meet with a resource navigator by appointment only. We do feed people every single day we do hearty lunches that are the equivalent of about two meals, because they don't have a lot of resources here in this area now. There are some volunteers that are trying to serve dinner meals at night, which I think they've been somewhat successful in doing that but they're not a sanctioned food. Meal Program I guess is what I would say. I think the only one that is sanctioned is St Francis house, they have gone down to one night a week which is Wednesday nights. So quite literally they don't have an opportunity for breakfast. It could be that our lunches are the only lunch they get or the meal they get all day, which is why we make them very hearty. Also, we are starting an outreach service and so we receive money from the county Cova dollars to create a mobile resources response team and basically what that includes is an RV, and two trailers one with showers and the other ones with laundry services. We will be picking up the RV sometime next week, getting that situated and stocked with three laptop computers, it's going to have a couple of hotspots on it, so that we can serve people in the best way possible including video conferencing either with for coordinated entry, or for doctor's appointments and things like that. Our goal is to have an interagency team we've been contacting some of the path teams that we work with and some of the other groups that come out to new hope regularly and have been doing that for the last five years, who are very excited about this. And what that would entail is our goal is to have three times out in the community. Every week Monday Wednesday Fridays, we're going to be posted up probably at church parking lots that are big enough to hold all of the equipment that we're going to be bringing, and then we would invite the other service providers to either ride along with us in the RV we can take up to five people, or to bring their own vehicles in and come there and help us serve people. What I think why I think this is really important is, with more and more people becoming homeless, I having an opportunity to go to one location, and not only get entered into Hemis but then also get handed off right there and then to somebody in coordinated entry to get them into the system is going to be a big bonus I think for the people that are out on the street and and there are more and more of them out there I just heard from one of our path team people that they went out to Pac Avenue and saw, at least 100 people that they did not recognize from the week before. So, it's getting real, but being able to provide services, even though it's not overnight shelter. We do intend to have onboard the RV sleeping bags tents backpacks. All the toiletries, things of that nature things that they need when they're out on the street to try and help create their own personal shelter as much as possible. And so we're really excited about that. And as far as New Hope, we may turn it into a bit of a warming center during inclement weather we will only be able to bring in at max, six people at a time so we're going to be looking to our partners in the county to be able to shelter overnight. For folks this year. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 43:45 Thanks, Paul and if you want to, again, drop your email in the chat box so people have questions. So, we've had an opportunity at least as far as I know, to give a brief introduction to all the shelter providers who were able to confirm. And as you can tell with 100 beds here and 50 beds here we end up with some version of a route 500 shelter beds that throughout the county there's a few other shelters that we didn't have connections with or that we weren't able to arrange but we still, even just using the point in time count numbers which we know are gross undercount we still have, we don't have the capacity needed to make sure everybody's sleeping outdoors can sleep indoors, especially in the winter. So with that said, we would like to take this opportunity to drop into breakout groups to kind of brainstorm that solution. Rob is going to do his best to divvy up some of the, I guess I'll call the core team of the people working on the coalition work right now, and making sure that help design the conversation around how do we address the cold weather. This year, what can we do, what does the need look like what are some creative ideas we know that there's stuff happening with safe parking for example and Maureen gave a brief introduction before the meeting actually started a few jumped on early about some of the funding availability for like hotel rooms and other type safety measures that shelters could take if they had resources to add more beds. Last year I got I was saying with Louise and Melissa and Martha Salvation Army we made every nook and cranny into a room and if you guys remember Snowmageddon February 2019. There was some really intense Fridays where I'm playing taxi with my four wheel drive trying to make sure that the Nativity house, there was already over 40 beds over using every office and cafeteria and Louise using every office and we were having 27 year old sleeping in our room that has Democrat, the beacon center and all that fun stuff that we did on a Friday night during Snowmageddon to make sure that nobody slept outside and still people have outside we still had a news article from mattress we'll have a client who didn't make it inside and passed away. And we, we just know we can't do that strategy this year. There's not one COVID case in an environment like that we'll have a whole other kind of problem that that will brew. So with that said, I know that Rob is going to break us up into groups and this is going to be an exciting hopeful conversation, not the doom and gloom that I'm making it sound we're gonna say, how do we make sure this doesn't happen, we have two months, got some funders in the room we got some smart people in the room we got shelter providers in the room. Let's talk it out and let's come up with some solutions and try to figure out what we can propose, it's going to be different this year, so that we don't have to wait until the first fall and freak out and run into taxi drivers and make decisions of grab an extra person and violate six feet, or do I let them step aside, or this person has cooled symptoms, what do I do with that person, etc, etc, etc. So I'm going to hand off to Iraq to break this up into groups and start us off. Rob Huff - MDC 46:50 Yeah. So here's the goal. I'm going to set up six rooms and have zoom automatically split everybody out into those rooms. Please, in the room have somebody take kind of some general notes because the idea is that we're going to spend 15 minutes in the breakout room, and then come back and do a report out. James there's a request in the chat if you could place the questions that we need to consider in the chat box. That way everybody will have access to it. And I'm going to start doing the rooms so let's see. And there will be a countdown as we get closer to the end, to warn everybody when we're about to about to come out of the breakout room so let's have a good conversation. All right, so I can't even tell what room we're actually in. Unknown Speaker 1:01:36 Hi, Larry. Unknown Speaker 1:01:47 Can we get put into a different breakout room. Rob Huff - MDC 1:02:26 Welcome back everybody. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:02:33 All right. Sorry I couldn't I couldn't figure out how to unmute Now that everything moved on my screen. Rob Huff - MDC 1:02:38 I know there's a little bit of chaos with these but it's kind of a fun process. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:02:44 Well hopefully everyone both got to do a little bit of networking and have conversations that just blew our minds about how we're going to solve this, I'm excited. came up with. I'm actually the note taker for group one so if people don't mind me keep talking I'll just kick us off with our, our notes, and then I'll let Rob kind of navigate who's group two and three. A lot of what I'm going to bring up is ideas, I'm sure had been bounced around before and have been bounced around other groups but I'll just kind of read them. So, and here's County Parks and Rec or Metro parks, participate in a freezing night style shelter expansion, working with other agencies or faith ministries like Vallejo or MDC CLR CCS to do the staffing piece of it. armories of Tacoma and Puyallup. Are we doing everything we can with Kazakh dollars. Do we need a larger organization to kind of apply for the work so the smaller organizations can benefit from it and not have to do the Fiscal Sponsorship kind of stuff. Can high schools play a role in the large like mega churches or other churches that aren't open right now, that have space that may play a role. Think parking, piala, apparently is applying for emergency shelter funds but but we didn't know where how or who the details weren't clear Vallejo and YMCA already has a partnership can that expand equal sheltering. Good. We look at shelter expansion and the current congregate shelters differently, for example, can they actually add space, add bunk beds add tents, at shower curtains like could things be rearranged in a way that could add bodies but keep it safe. And then the, we're going to end up with just not enough space so when that happens, how can we look at helping folks who are going to eventually stay outside stay warm and stay dry tents or hungry, tents or military tents or whatever else we can come up with thoughts I don't know we don't, we didn't get that far, and then final statement by owl, we probably should go to the governing bodies and ask them what they're going to fund, and then we can decide how to do it. That was the final statement. So that's group one. Rob Huff - MDC 1:05:01 Roger. Great and who's going to speak for group two. Theresa Power-Drutis 1:05:06 So everyone else took a step back so I'm speaking for group two. We had sort of several categories one category was indoor solutions and they included some of the things that James already mentioned the high school gyms purchasing a hotel with carriers money making use of other empty buildings, including working more closely with churches to see if they might be willing to step into this just for the inclement weather piece. And then we talked about some outdoor also another indoor solution would be more tiny house villages. Unknown Speaker 1:05:49 And then we talked about some outdoor Unknown Speaker 1:05:52 options which would be having a safe Theresa Power-Drutis 1:05:55 campsite, with some sort of warming situation, available at the campsite safe. Car lots, and possibly during inclement weather even in going into covered. Car logs temporarily working out some agreement with that and see my my notes are really great James I don't know how you did that. But then we had another set of things which was about kind of the infrastructure around helping people get where they need to get, and one of those was helping doing some kind of educational outreach some kind of burst of information that gets to the general public about the fact that people who are homeless are not necessarily dealing with COVID, that it is safe to keep helping in one way or another, people don't have to step back from offering shelters, just because COVID is here, there are ways to do it safely. And also, you know, even when someone does have code we didn't even get to that part of the conversation. We also talked about the fact that it's hard to know where these empty beds are that people who are in the system have, communicate, but it's really hard for people who are just doing referrals to know where to send people. It would be great if someone took ownership of that information. In this sense, they own the information and their responsibilities to convey it to the public. That allows the public to know how dire the situation is or how easy the situation is it allows other people we're doing referrals to give good referrals and it feels like there's a firewall between the information we need to do our work, and the people who contain the information that was a little bit of a tirade on my part, I added to what the person said Unknown Speaker 1:07:50 sorry if I didn't go in the direction that you were Theresa Power-Drutis 1:07:54 then the only other thing I tried to see if I missed anything else that somebody called it a shelter of it will be of the availability network. And yes that ownership of the information. Someone in the city or county, actually, owning that they need to convey that information to us some way or another. Did I miss anything folks anybody in my group unmute yourself and shout out that I missed you. Unknown Speaker 1:08:21 I was great Theresa. Unknown Speaker 1:08:24 Yep. Nope. Thank you gotta cover. Alright, thanks. Rob Huff - MDC 1:08:28 Perfect. So group three who's gonna speak for the goal Rosemary Powers 1:08:31 I this is Rosemary I'll speak for group three. And we spent some time networking about what people are doing, which cut down a bit on our on our creative ideas time. But in general, we, we mostly talked about resources available to people that could be expanded and a couple of policy issues the resources, and a new newish resource that Dan has spoke about is the Catholic community services the chirp program homeless resolution partnerships, and they're looking for some more diversion partners on the east side so if anybody's interested in that I can contact down and maybe to put your, your name and contact information in the chat. And then we had a representative, Natalie from Apple Health who is also provide some funding for things for back to school and all that people could contact. We had a representative from the landlord landlord liaison, who is finding trying to find landlords who will be willing during this time to make agreements with tenants, and to promote the idea of the importance of that and keeping people housed. And we also just the see who it is, for the policy issue was around sanitation and the basic need for water and resources that even though that's something that's happening all the time that it's can only get worse when cold weathers is making it even harder so I think I've left out some things but it was a good conversation around the opportunities that people in our group present to people who are in need and the desire to work together for more Rob Huff - MDC 1:10:17 great group for Valeri Knight - Pierce County Human Service 1:10:20 ama speaking for group for this is Valerie, so we spent a lot of time talking about how hotels are eligible under county funding but a lot of times they are not utilized so folks either don't apply for them based on staffing concerns, or just really the cost of a hotel. It was recommended that we create them just like a community relationship with hotels so that, for example, I know one agency out pool is paying a lot less for hotels based on their negotiations and other community members are. And so that was brought up, as well as utilizing community buildings. There's a lot of schools that are empty gyms that are empty. Just a lot of community centers that are empty so those cannot be utilized potentially, you would have to staff them so that was going to be a barrier to work through. But that was brought up as well as prevention if you prevent someone from ever going into the homeless system, you don't have to have a shelter for them to have. So we talked about Rapid Rehousing we talked about diversion which is huge and can be expanded as well as ippc. So, inside passages Pierce County so they're working with folks that are going through the system that prevent them from actually going through shelter so that's a big one and then for PMP I learned something very new and very cool so we talked about how there's a variety of grants out there that are available with Tacoma public utilities as well as PSE. And so folks who they really want to connect and make sure that everyone has the necessary PBE equipment, and of course the health department and Department of Emergency Management has access to pee pee as well so we did cover both of those things. Did I forget anything anyone on my team. Unknown Speaker 1:11:56 So, chicken eggs. Rob Huff - MDC 1:11:57 Great. That's pretty good. Gross Unknown Speaker 1:11:59 area I just had one more thing I really meant to say and I don't want to leave it out but down I was describing how at their day center on South Tacoma way that they are trying to provide a school setting for kids who have no place to do their studying if they're homeless. And so that's why they have to be careful about COVID issues they're going to be making out available so that's another resource that we can know about. Rob Huff - MDC 1:12:25 Great. How about group five. Maureen Howard 1:12:30 I'll start and then people can chime in. So we decided that we should declare a COVID winter response. So, especially providers know we're making recommendations for this winter, given the virus and things can change in the future. This is not a lifetime commitment that it inclement weather, be a seasonal timeframe, rather than night by night, it's just less stressful on the providers, they can staff up. Identify buildings apparently MDC might have one, but certainly other people have identified buildings and we didn't spend a lot of time on that, by a hotel, or more, but not on hosmer because of heavy sex trafficking. So, pick the locations with consideration of the environment. And then make sure that there really is enough money for the providers to cover their real expenses so the executive director is not the last one in the office, transporting somebody to the hotel kind of thing just be real honest be real honest, we're full folks. There are 200 people on the waiting list for the stability center Paul identified 100 they haven't seen before, there are, there were two empty rooms on the earlier part of today's call. So, let's not pretend we have space. So anybody want to add in. Laurie said she can't imagine how you will do this neither can I, Rob Huff - MDC 1:14:13 but thanks Maureen, thanks Maureen, um, so group six who was taking notes there. Megan Capes - TDSA 1:14:19 I can speak I was taking some notes. So we talked a lot about similar things like safe car lots. Unknown Speaker 1:14:25 Um, Megan Capes - TDSA 1:14:27 there. So a couple things came out, especially Ron data like forecasting. The impact on the on house like thinking about health impacts of lack of shelter. As a way like we all don't want to talk about it but like the death toll that's coming, if, if we don't have the shelter capacity. So, especially funding hotel rooms and even buying a hotel, using school gyms which we already got support from Tacoma public schools on our last petition about this in March. And one person raised, thinking about if folks are living on sheltered about getting access to a mailing address because that's really important. Getting out of homelessness. One idea was incentive for landlords. Another one was especially like the reality is, is we do not have enough shelter now for everyone experiencing homelessness. I, we have to think about how are we going to care for people that are living unsheltered. I'm advocating for stopping sweeps during this winter because if sweeps continue it means like what's going to happen when people Park everything's going to get soaked it puts people super at risk in the winter when it's rainy and cold for hypothermia and trying to like scramble to find a new safe location. I'm allocating funding now for like severe weather, camping gear and viewing and also because we do have an emergency in Tacoma, like advocating for pausing of permitting and zoning so that we're really able to create shelter and create options, um, yeah and then also collecting some data on the cost of having folks living unsheltered so like healthcare system impact criminal justice impact to really show the elevation the cost of this and how it can be reallocated. I'm also going to. Yeah. Rob Huff - MDC 1:16:40 Great, any final comments before James wraps it up. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:16:52 Okay, well I would say one of the goals will be like we kind of done before, Garrett was kind of again the mastermind behind it but well. The people who shared today the facilitators, or the note takers will all meet up offline, either after this meeting or next week to take all the notes and kind of formalize our recommendations like we've done before. And this could be an opportunity as, as many of us and myself sit on the CSC to have this conversation with the CSC but also to make our requests. And I would say something we haven't done in the past that I would like to offer is there's folks that run really small ministries are programs that are like one or two staff members and they're like man I would love to apply for this I don't have time I don't have the ability, and maybe we can put together a work group that can do the application. On behalf of an agency or be the one of our larger agencies can do physical sponsorship, my agency would strangle me if they said I'm taking on another project right now that isn't already something we're doing, but if I offered my own time to help get that stuff started and someone else did the work, actual physical work I would absolutely be willing to sponsor and help that way or. I'm sure we have other folks who would do that as well. I don't want us to be limited by what we have. I want us to reach out and ask for what we need, and then build from there because like Maureen other people have said like we do this every year and every year, there's tears and there's stress and there's anger and like I'm more than one side that have weekend conversations and trips in here, and I said last year you can look it up Madras wrote a nice article quoting my agency, which resulted in me violating confidentiality and going in a hearing to stateway violated confidentiality, but I was so mad that we couldn't come up with a better response and emotional and I responded that way. And I took the brunt of that information, and that situation, but I don't feel like we have to do this every year and make it up every single year. It would be nice if we could. Yes, this year we'll do it for COVID but let's make a plan that, that we can sustain. So, all that to say I'm very excited that we did have at least, both of our kind of largest community funders the city in the county, or at least the largest municipalities here today to participate in that exercise and, and to take that information back at least maybe can help us in there, in the right directions if we're not out that if the option wasn't presented that was directly. What was considered but if there's an agency or a city that's like hey we want to do something maybe we can be pointed in that direction. So with that said, Thank you all for that exercise I see that we have a lot of county staff here so I'm going to hand off to the county for updates and I know one of the updates I've requested and then I asked him, Manu who's out sick. But the care center or the Community Care Center the temporary care site has changed management, and any updates on that would be helpful, as well as whatever updates. You have so I don't know if I'm handing off to but Val heathered john Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:19:50 gonna pick the starting starting spot here. So Hi everybody, my name is Heather moss, I'm the Director of Human Services for Pierce County I see a lot of familiar faces and familiar names. So it's good to see you all again and a lot of new partners, at least to me so it's nice to meet you. Two dimensionally, at least for now and hope you are all doing well in our, our COVID and other crazy world activities right now. So I understand that last week you had some questions for staff from human services, about the emergency shelter grant that we've been working on in partnership with a few other jurisdictions, I'm going to get to that but i thought i'd just take a minute to talk to you more generally about some of the activities that we've been working on that the staff have been so busy with around COVID response. So as I've come to talk to this group. A few months ago, gosh, it can't believe it's we're talking about months now about care, the cares Act. The county received a 150 $8 million in cares funding you heard from Marine earlier in this conversation that Pierce County is one of five jurisdictions in the state that received dollars directly from the federal government. So that's the the bucket to which I'm referring early on the executive worked with the council to figure out how to start dividing out those dollars, and they made them into very big, they put the dollars into very big broad categories. one of which is titled community response and resiliency and that really was meant to cover all of the services that you would think of in a social service response to a pandemic like we are in now. So, my, so the Human Services Department, and our partners have really been responsible for figuring out how best to distribute those dollars, what to spend those dollars on to be responsive to our COVID issues. And of that 150 $8 million. Approximately 25 million of it has been allocated to this community response and resiliency. I'm pretty proud of the work that we've done on our website to share where those dollars are going so if you have questions about how those dollars are being allocated you can look on the Human Services Department website, or you can look at open Pierce County and there's a lot of great detail about how that community response resiliency bucket has been allocated and spent, along with you the rest of the 150 $8 million, but just briefly what we've been focused on right now is what you would expect, emergency supporting emergency shelter. Funding expansion of shelters where we can. We have a lot of money going into nutrition supports whether that's Food Bank support or actual home delivered meals to seniors who are unable to leave their homes. We are funding domestic violence services capacity expansion, as well as behavioral health expansion. We also have special programs set up for our veterans to make sure that they receive services that they need in this time. And then one of our biggest programs right now in our biggest pushes is around rental and mortgage assistance, so when Valerie spoke earlier about prevention. I, like many of you, I'm not sleeping well at night when I think about the long term economic toll that this the the that COVID is having on our community and I know that it's pushing a lot of people who are already vulnerable, on, on to more of a brink of being homeless and we want to do everything we can to prevent that. So we have put on over $4 million of cares act into rental rental assistance, but as you all have likely heard, we have another $10.7 million coming from the state to supplement that so we are working fast and furious on getting rental assistance out the door to prevent people from adding to our homeless rolls it's dismayed to hear that our homeless population is growing. But we are hoping to prevent that, or mitigate that as much as possible. So I just wanted to give you that update and and encourage you to seek more information. If you have questions specifically about cares act, please reach out to me or any of the stuff at the Human Services Department we'll be happy to share information for you or if you're able to go on to our website and check out the Human Services Department website or the open Pierce County website. So that's a little plug for cares. Again, one more thing I want to say before I get to the 4.7, is that you also have been, you probably hear that there are other dollars coming to the counties so particularly to human services. So we have during the normal course of the year, we have grants that come to us from the federal government and from the state government. Many of those are non COVID related but obviously we're thinking about them now in terms of our COVID response. But then we also have a lot of new dollars that are coming to us that are COVID, specific. At this point we are in triage mode, frankly, and we're doing our most our best work right now to focus on the cares dollar since those have a expiration date of that on December 30 so we need to get those dollars out allocated and used appropriately and spent an invoice all by December 30. So, for any of the grants that we're receiving right now that have a little bit longer timeline into 2021, or holding off, frankly on making decisions on how to allocate those, so the conversation we just had is super helpful for us to be thinking about long term where the needs and where can we start focusing some of those dollars that are coming after the cares act dollars expire. So, to turn to the emergency shelter grant, I understand that Jeff gave you a brief presentation about that and I think he is on this call I know john as I see Valerie here too and a couple of other of our staff, so I'll give you the overview, but if you start asking too many details I might have to rely on staff who are more steeped in this than I am. But what we're doing right now is working on a grant we just submitted a couple days ago to the State Department of Commerce. They issued an RFP across the county across the state to all counties and local jurisdictions saying, We've got some money for you, for emergency shelter expansion, there are a couple of conditions. One of them is you can have this much money if you apply independently, or you can have 20% more if you work with your partners in your county to come together with a joint response. The other condition they have is that these shelter beds have to be up and running by the end of December, so once again we're a little bit under the gun here to try to get something in place. So back to that first condition what we've been working on the last few weeks is meeting on a pretty regular basis I think weekly, and by me. I mean, Valerie and Jeff meeting with our colleagues at the City of Tacoma, City of Lakewood Puyallup, and university place to first come together and say, is there some kind of nexus of common goals that we have where we can all agree to come together and pool our money and take advantage of Commerce, the state to the state's offer to give us more money if we all come together under a joint application for any of you who live in those communities or have worked with all of us in government and these different entities, that's no small task, and so I guess I just want to reinforce or clarify for you that that act of coming together and working hard to find common ground, among all those jurisdictions, has been pretty challenging, but also very rewarding and I'm really proud to say that we've come up with an application that all five of those jurisdictions have signed off on that we've submitted to commerce, we're very confident that we will get our full funding which is that $4.7 million to fund shelter expansion here in Pierce County. The offer on the table from the commerce is that those dollars can be used, partly for capital expenditure and acquisition and then can be used to some extent over the next I think three years it is to pay for operations. So the good news about this is that it comes with a little bit of a at least a short term window of revenue to pay for that expansion activity. What we submitted, though, was not much more than an agreement that these five entities are coming together and we have a sort of an aspirational proposal that we shared with commerce, that we would expand by 116 beds our shelter capacity in Pierce County. Over the next three months. We don't have a lot of details yet on locations, there are a couple of projects that are further down the road, that we slated as potential sources to receive these dollars, but that's where once we get approval back from commerce is where we start having conversations at the county level and at the local community level about where that those specific shelter beds should be located and what they look like. So, so all that to say I want to reassure you, I guess that we are not trying to get ahead of any community process what we're trying to do is get all of our government partners, aligned to a point where we can put in this application and now the work begins to bring in our community partners and talk about where those actual beds go and identify partners to provide OPERATIONS SUPPORT FOR THAT for that aspiration. So I think that's all I had to share with you Oh, I do want to say one other thing, just to give you an update on going back to rental assistance. We now have, as of yesterday 2900 applications in our queue that we are working through with our providers to get rental assistance, so I just wanted to share that with you too. So that's what I've got for you, and like I said I'm available for the rest of the hour. If we want to talk more if you have questions for me and if you have really detailed questions I'm going to hand it off to john and his team. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:30:06 I do think we have a few minutes for questions maybe the easiest way might be to put it in the chat box if you're able to, if you're on a phone and you can't. You're just gonna have to kind of interrupt us with your question, but I think we have, you know, 10 ish minutes or so for the county updates. So if you have any questions feel free to drop in the chat box or interrupt the. Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:30:34 I answered all your questions. That's awesome. Maureen Howard 1:30:37 Oh no. Rob Huff - MDC 1:30:41 Yeah, and I would say for the sake of timing. Don't you don't have to put them in the chat box. Let's just go ahead and bring them up. Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:30:50 Sherry from Vallejo asked if the shelter bed expansion over the next three months is to add 113 beds. 116 I think is what we ended up in within the contract or in the proposal and that was just penciling out estimates about acquisition versus how much it would cost to operate over the course of the Unknown Speaker 1:31:08 next three years. Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:31:13 Heather I think this kind of overview, that you just presented is really helpful to everybody. And I think it's a question of timing, that it would have been wonderful if this could have been a little earlier, even if you didn't have a full application ready to go in or just so that people were aware of what the Human Services is engaged in and, and various timelines and as those other monies come online, the CDBG and ESG CB monies. They come with waivers on public process, so it's going to be even more important that people understand the potential use of them, the availability of the money, and where and how to be engaged. Maureen Howard 1:32:08 Anyway, thanks for coming today. Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:32:11 That's a fair point and we will do our best to get the word out and share as we learn about what the dollar amounts are and what the timelines are and what are suggested processes around that. Just not to justify but I just want to remind you all to that the team that the county has working on homeless issues is about 10 people strong, and they are rightly so, very preoccupied right now with getting those cares dollars out that is a huge lift for us that $25 that $25 million that I reminded I shared with you earlier, is 2520, almost 30% increase over our regular budget so we don't have any new staff working on this. People are just working double time to get these dollars out so I totally agree with you and we are going to do our level best to keep you engaged, and to share with you as we learn what we learn and to have you. Help us through making those decisions. So I appreciate the suggestion Ryan thanks. Unknown Speaker 1:33:14 Oh, my name is Jeff leatham, I work with IP PC inside passages. I have two questions or concerns. One is when the rental moratoriums over, and the people I work with have to come up with funds. Are we being proactive and looking at that when it happens, and too, are some of the funds you talking about, are they available to nonprofit church organizations. Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:33:50 Okay, so rental moratorium yes that is a terrifying deadline that's looming large for all of us. October 15 or 16th I think it is. It might be that the governor extends that but frankly extending it is sort of a curse and a blessing right because it relieves pressure from people but it also makes them less worried about trying to make up that rental gap that they're missing so as I mentioned at the end of my last remarks we already have. 2900 people applying for rental assistance through our cares dollars and the commerce dollars were able to pay for up to three months of rent for eligible applicants eligible meaning they had to have a job loss related to COVID or wage loss income loss related to COVID, and they have to be at or below either 50% or 80% of ami depending on sort of which funding source of use. But you're right, the rental is more the rent moratorium eviction moratorium or explicitly is a scary place to be and so we're hoping that the rental assistance, kicks in for the people who are really at risk of being evicted. The other thing I can share is that I know that Pierce County Superior Court is one of the few counties in the state that's working on a pilot program to provide mediation and legal intervention for tenants who are at risk of being evicted. It's in early stages I believe that that program is set to launch in mid September, which is a month before the moratorium ends, and we are partnering with them to make sure that we are prioritizing rental assistance for tenants who are in that program as well. So that's what we've got going on county level. Those state dollars to fund our rental assistance program is the state response to rental assistance. So, people need to know that if they need help with paying their rent they need to contact us or to Marines point, there are a few smaller jurisdictions that are using some of their indirect cares dollars or other revenue to provide rental assistance. Regarding your question about funds available to churches. I don't know that we have any funds that are directly funding church efforts, other than we do have dollars that are funding a lot of the nutrition supports that churches are running, or if they are operating shelter beds indirectly through other shelters that we've been. We've been funding. So I think that's the best answer that I've got for you around cares dollars being available to our church community. Unknown Speaker 1:36:27 Are we just supposed to jump in because I have a question that I'm going to jump in. In terms of the way the money will be used how much of it is marked for publicly owned housing so that we don't just look at three years we're actually looking at a longer term Theresa Power-Drutis 1:36:44 or earmarking any that specifically for publicly owned housing. Do you mean that 4.7 are the cares dollars, any of it anywhere. So, Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:36:58 part of the rental assistance program is paying for rent of people who live in private housing theoretically right. But we also have funding allocated. I don't recall the number. It's like one and a half million maybe john for affordable housing in that we are allowed, we're going to have an application process for people who operate affordable housing housing that's below market rent to get compensated for loss of revenue in their operations. So, and that's what we're doing in the cares dollars on the emergency shelter grant from the State Department of Commerce. I think what the focus in on that contract or that grant specifically is emergency shelter and shelter beds only, so I don't know that there's a, an anticipation that that can be used. The last thing I'll offer Teresa is that, you know, we've, we've heard loud and clear from a lot of our stakeholders that we should be considering buying a hotel with cares dollars. I alone did not have control over those dollars, there are a lot of decision makers in the mix that that decide how we spend those dollars and so we've, we've been thinking about it and we've been looking at options to do that it's easier said than done, frankly, but if that were to come to play the ideal goal would be using something like a hotel as short term, non congregate shelter and then eventually turning that into affordable housing supportive supportive housing of some kind, so that's absolutely under consideration. Oh and I wanted to say Teresa one last thing since you mentioned it earlier you talked about that empty bed status in the shelters. I know that that's something that Garrett had been working on a while ago. I'm super interested in us being able to pick up that work and create some kind of online resource that everybody can go to to look at on a daily basis about what the shelter capacity is so it's in our it's on our list to do and we're gonna get to it. Theresa Power-Drutis 1:39:02 And we appreciate the work you've done to get stuff out online as a county, I mean there's, there's a lot of useful information that you put out there. I just, I really want to say publicly owned housing is something that we let go of a long time ago because there were some problems around it, single occupancy rooms sorrows are another thing that have been like go. Those are two things that if we had maintained. We would not be in the fixed we're in we'd be in a fix. But we would not be in the difficult fix we are now, and anything that happens now that's going to last us for three years. We are just kicking the can down the road. So, please, please, if there's any way to make some of those funds go into permanent affordable publicly owned housing. That is a long term solution that we need desperately. So, I'm just saying. Everything else is short term. You're 65. It all looks like short term unless publicly owned housing. Heather Moss - Pierce County Human Services 1:40:03 Well, I mean, yes, I agree with you and I'd want up you in the sense that really private homeownership is the ultimate holy grail right so you know even one more step further down the continuum is helping people get into that homeownership state. So, yeah, I agree with you that we have serious gaps to fill all along the continuum of housing. Maureen Howard 1:40:27 Oh can I jump in on what Heather mentioned about the eviction moratorium. We do think it's going to end on the 15th. And in a way, I agree I kind of hope it does but this period of time in between. When we really have an opportunity to do something people are not coming, coming forward, they're not trying to get payment plans, and I want to let everybody know that the Cova pro Bono's housing Justice Project has a partnership with the Center for dialogue and resolution and fair housing we are prepared right now to provide free mediation. If people contact us, the housing Justice Project it's become a pro bono we can facilitate that now before the state's program gets started. They're expecting it'll probably start if they're lucky by October 1 and we'll, we'll be folded into that but Pierce County's lucky because we've received some funding to start that now, so people can contact us I put my, put the email in the chat. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 1:41:30 Heather I'm wondering, in regard to the real time access to records are available in the community. What are the pros and cons of housing data to Warren Warren really been created another Unknown Speaker 1:41:46 information resource. I've mixed feelings of not to one mine But how did you see it. Unknown Speaker 1:41:53 Yeah, we haven't really thought Unknown Speaker 1:41:54 through a lot of the details yet just that a validation that something like that is needed that we need real time data on the capacity of our shelters, and then what their current census might be where it's housed is immaterial but I do believe, to Teresa's point earlier that the county or some other entity public entity has a role there in being able to span across all of the different shelters, and frankly we have a little bit of power in the sense that we fund a lot of the shelters and can make it a condition of funding. Just a little preview for some of you, but I think I don't know that it really matters where it sits as long as it's easily accessible to people who are making referrals to one one is, is a potential option for sure. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:42:50 I think this might be a good time to drop contact info in the chat box for answer questions that sounds like there's a lot of interest to have you guys back into the invalid and Jeff attend regularly. So, I think we'll have more opportunities going forward to make sure that you're the county that steadily on the agenda to address questions as they come up each week. But I'm going to say thank you so much for those updates I'm sure people might have more questions if you or whoever you'd like to be the contact person just dropped the email in there I'm sure everyone knows how to get ahold of all of you but just in case. I think that's a great thing. Unknown Speaker 1:43:24 Yep, I put my name and email in there if you need to reach out to me but hopefully you know a lot of my colleagues have the Human Services Department well who can likely answer your questions better than I. So we're happy to be available as needed. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:43:38 Thank you so much. I know the next updates for the city to come I see there is a person named city of Tacoma, and I'm wondering if that person's giving us any updates I didn't have anybody respond back to me from the city saying that there was any specific updates, but I wanted to offer. If Erica or sorry, Unknown Speaker 1:43:55 I just jumped on, I don't know who the city to come a person is. Unknown Speaker 1:44:04 I do have an update so I'm sorry I just jumped on late so I'm a little ill prepared. So give me a second to find the update that I had for you guys and I know that Alison Unknown Speaker 1:44:17 provided the update yesterday during the shelter call Unknown Speaker 1:44:22 feel like I've been trying to do. 20 things at once so sorry. Unknown Speaker 1:44:29 I did okay there it is. So I just wanted to remind all of our currently funded providers that we do have a funding opportunity for some digital infrastructure. So people who do currently have a contract with the city to comma we are providing some funds out for digital infrastructure, especially in response to the pandemic we do know that a lot of our operators have had to modify their programming and address how they want to respond. So I just wanted to remind everyone that's out there if you do have any questions please reach out to me. You should have gotten some communication about that. Unknown Speaker 1:45:12 And that's all I have. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:45:15 Awesome, thanks. I think the only other governmental update we usually have is the health department. Manu does that normally he's out sick he told me that he he was I tasked him with giving me the, the new information about the care center or trying to connect me with somebody from the new operator, but but maybe that'll be next week but maybe Val just unmuted herself to jump in, I don't know if that's the case, but maybe, Unknown Speaker 1:45:38 so we know the New Year center is going to be through multicare and john and I are working on getting you a contact we've asked that they come to the coalition and do a presentation as well as we've also asked them to come to the three o'clock shelter calls, so that everyone has the exact same information. So as soon as we get that contact, they just took over on Monday, so I'm pretty sure they're going through their own little Growing Pains at the moment, but as soon as we get that contact we'll get them scheduled and we'll reach out. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:46:04 Awesome, thanks I know that that I heard plenty of concerns about the previous process and I'm, I'm excited that we have a new operator and we'll, we'll see if the concerns are alleviated with new operator. I don't know if anyone else in the health department carries name but if there's any other health department updates. I'll give a couple of seconds for someone to jump in. All right, well interrupt me if you choose to rob you're gonna have to remind me if I have anything else on the agenda. Rob Huff - MDC 1:46:32 We do. We have Maureen's advocacy update. Maureen Howard 1:46:37 Good safe parking also do you want to do that first or. Rob Huff - MDC 1:46:41 Well, so what I would say about safe parking is is it's a group continues meeting I don't see. I don't see Janet, or Collin on the call. So, I don't think there's a whole lot new to report there right at this moment less Megan thinks that there's something more to say about safe parking. Unknown Speaker 1:47:04 There's not much to report on the working, we're working on the applications for site, so for sites to apply as well as the agreements on say parklets for guests that are coming on. I know call, they'll be more updates later, later next week because we're getting more word. There's a meeting on Monday at 11am, that we've set up. If you would like these zoom like invitation fields, feel free to email me if you'd like to be added to the Google group for specific updates I'll drop my email in the chat. Rob Huff - MDC 1:47:45 Perfect. Yeah. Okay. But you have the floor morning, Maureen Howard 1:47:50 I have the floor. Okay, thank you. If you're on the listserv you received way too many emails, earlier this morning that were pretty much eviction prevention focused tenant focused. For those of you who are working that end as well. There. What we're starting to see. Come out, University of Washington's got a brand new study out highest risk neighborhoods, urban Institute's out most of these are really easy to use, you can drill down to the local continuum of care. You can they, you know, zip codes or census blocks that are covered. you can do it by county, you can do it in by neighborhood, so we can get a real sense of high risk and hopefully down the road, we can hopefully the county can will have the ability to sort of match, where the rental systems money's going out against these highest risk areas of our community. I know everybody's tracking race. But we also have the ability to track class basically income by these other data bases opportunities, and probably did ask questions that I haven't thought about yet, but will, that might be helpful as we encourage decisions on how money should be spent. Okay, so I didn't do a one pager because I ran out of bandwidth. But three things that are sort of the top of the pile. One is in the past the coalition has had candidate forums, during election years, and they've really been pretty amazing. Especially after al gave us that new format to use. So, Cynthia Stewart, who's a member regular participant the coalition is not able to be here this morning, and she asked if I would pass on to everybody that she's more than willing to help. If the coalition wants to host candidate forums. She's not going to do that, what she does. Traditionally, is to really help whomever wants to do it. It's a great way to sort of get your feet wet, without having to recreate everything Cynthia's got all the information contact information procedural information, and the league does candidate forums, all the time and has them scheduled this this fall. But, so, so two questions. One is, do we want as a coalition, try to have candidate forums. This fall, because if we do. We've got to decide, like now because candidates schedules are filling up so that that's one thing. And if we want to. Who would like to lead it doesn't have to be one person but needs to be a couple people could be couple could be a group. And if so, Cynthia will help whomever wants to do this. And if not, we'll, you know, if we decide we're going to take a buy this year, just because of everything else, then there are other opportunities the league is is partnering with the Tacoma Pierce County Affordable Housing Consortium. They have three county level candidate forum scheduled in September and October. And while the questions are heavily housing and they lean heavily on what's called the Burke report, which is really about trying to get private investors, private developers developing housing. There are some questions about homelessness. So that's an avenue people could join those there will doubtless be other candidate forums, other candidate conversations. So, it's kind of like, I don't know if people want to put something in the chat, and there is a working group that meets after this meeting and maybe that group can take it up but that's something that is a priority. Second thing is, and we've gone over most of this right now and this is the whole eviction defenses, how do we keep as many people house as possible. October 15 is the deadline for the eviction moratorium. It'll be 14 days before those unlawful detainers began to hit the courts, and the eviction court pilot, the early resolution process that Heather and Lori talked about that I was calling mandated mediation this other title is much nicer. It Michael Mira is a member of the executive director of Tacoma housing authority as a member of that working group. And so, if they are ready to go by mid September, that would be great. But it assumes two things one well seems courts approve. But then it also assumes that there are enough lawyers, so that every tenant has a lawyer. And it also assumes that every tenant who goes to mediation goes with rent assistance in hand. And so that affects the system by which people apply are deemed eligible, and what they receive by way of rental assistance so that's what makes the mediation work that the tenants got rent assistance to bring to the table. And I would argue that the county, out of the goodness of their hearts and because they're handling the bulk of the rental assistance if they could also make available at least the contact person, and the amount of money that's available for these individual jurisdictions that have decided to do their own rental assistance. And just as a sticky note. We should invite to come a Community House they've got the rent assistance for youth coming out of the office of homeless youth at commerce. That's the same general pot of money is the 10 point 7 million, that's coming, the rap money, but the Office of Homeless Youth Services has allocated their money separately and of course has separate eligibility. I did spend a few minutes trying to figure out how many months of rental assistance I could get if I fell like a Venn diagram and you fall into all of the proper eligibilities and actually I did pretty well if I were a youth, under 50%. So, in a veteran maybe two, so that the third thing is the question that's been on the table many times and it really ties in I think to our earlier discussion, which I thought were totally well around the shelters reporting in the winter shelters in the breakout rooms and all that sort of stuff I thought accomplished a lot of things. And I learned a huge amount. So, should we, as a coalition adopt certain policy positions I'm not talking about an individual program, or an individual agency. But should we develop should we develop certain policy positions that we would agree to sort of like principles that we kind of had the principle of who we are, the Open Table everybody Welcome, you know, that sort of thing. But should we go beyond that, and in a more organized fashion, we've done this on some individual things sort of a sense of the whoever's on that whomever is on the meeting. But should we go forward with that and if so, how would we do it, and if I'm not looking for answers today I'm looking just to plant the question, if you have immediate thoughts, put them in the chat, if you would. And, but it's something I think we want to, we need to pick up, because, you know like, Heather said this morning, how much she heard from us. Is that how we want to communicate. Or do we want other differently, organized as not replacing but as options, sort of things. So, you know, some of our friends at the national level have put out frameworks for that are basically principles for the use of money. The equitable distribution the equitable framework for the use of not just the cares Relief Fund, but also the coming ESG CV the CDBG CDBG CV, the FEMA money that's already out there. So, just. Those are the top of my piles at the moment. There are a huge number of what to look look to be really good opportunities around, preventing homelessness, around responding to homelessness, that are coming out by webinar or by Article all kinds of ways. In a perfect world you'd get one email that has the links to all of those. It's an imperfect world for right now. And if you haven't registered for the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance annual conference on homelessness. That registration is still open it's all by zoom and you get the one day of housing Washington free. So it's a good year to do that. So, you know how to find me. So thank you, and as always thanks for letting me do this. Rob Huff - MDC 1:58:11 Thank you, Maureen. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:58:14 I was gonna say so one of the requests that we kind of had again from our kind of research or informal survey was that we had some networking time. So we are going to do kind of a quick highlight of one person who has an announcement and then offer kind of a go to the order space but Julian Wheeler asked to give an announcement that he put in the chat box but if you missed it. This is your opportunity. Julian to share. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 1:58:42 All I just say it's in a chat box but, and it's good to see Heather moss on the call and Valerie, and the ACC stands for Accessible community advisory committee and I volunteer as a chair of the Pierce County ACC, our next meeting is online is Tuesday September 8 at nine o'clock. My email addresses in the chat box as well. We are, we help we aid in expediting funds for accessibility projects and mandated by the state law the accessible communities act of 2010. We welcome new members new ideas and and speakers for our next regular sessions, coming up in the odd numbered months, but we certainly invite people to consider. You know, having worked together. Since we can possibly find a way to fund, something in your scope of work anywhere on anyone on this on this call, it could be characterized as an accessibility project. Thank you very much. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 1:59:48 Awesome. And now we've, we're done with the actual agenda but leaving space for good of the order or networking times or introduction times I don't know how we would do it exactly in the real world, we kind of just linger, but I'm gonna let Rob offer a chance to anyone wants me to go the order of Rob had anything else to wrap up. Otherwise, that's all I have messy out. Rob Huff - MDC 2:00:09 Yeah. Unknown Speaker 2:00:14 Three things, I always start with three things Unknown Speaker 2:00:18 which are just sort of general information, first of all, the City Planning Commission and the Human Rights Commission have agreed that we are going to do some sort of the collaboration to try to improve equity and the distribution of housing in the community, and that effort has been on hold because of the virus but I got a message yesterday that that will be starting up, and our focus on the Human Rights Commission will probably be in the area of trying to get some changes in planning and zoning Unknown Speaker 2:00:53 rules to allow more density and Unknown Speaker 2:00:59 create more workspaces that might be affordable to people. The second thing is that I've talked before about the pending collaboration between the Homeless Coalition in the chamber of commerce and the Chamber of Commerce Committee chair has gotten the approval of the Tom Pearson And the chamber board president for that collaboration and it will go before their board meeting shortly so that collaboration will be beginning to develop it was interesting that Ben Ferguson who's the chair that group said that he was going to ask Sherry Vallejo to head the portion, their portion of the discussion over workforce development, I don't know if you know that yet sure, but I was gonna nominate you to do it on our side so I think you've got to be a fairly important bridge and Unknown Speaker 2:02:00 I'm super excited Alan I want to meet with you to, to, to chat about the conversation that's gone on up to this point and see how I could Unknown Speaker 2:02:08 do my best to represent the coalition on the board. Unknown Speaker 2:02:12 I don't think there's much conflict of interest in this situation. We're all we really are all very much on the same wavelength, as far as I can tell, one of the things that Garrett was able to do with zoom wish to create a poll capability. Remember, we asked how many people were in favor of this chamber collaboration, and I don't know how to create a poll but it seems to me that's a very easy device for figuring out how many of our folks on this side are in favor of or opposed to some policy issue or, or question and that kind of thing so polling seems to be a fairly simplified answer we can figure out how to do it. Rob Huff - MDC 2:02:53 So if we have items we want to pull that something that we can set up ahead of time and we can do it again. Unknown Speaker 2:02:59 less than is back to this issue of freezing nights for a minute. In our breakout group I said that I think it's really important that we at began to ask the governing bodies of the various organizations that might have space that could be used if they would be willing to allow it to be used. Now governing bodies here like boards of directors organizations or school boards or church governing boards or landlords, big outfit, big places like the Unknown Speaker 2:03:38 building above the county, city building. Unknown Speaker 2:03:41 But I think we need to be asking those folks rather than just asking among ourselves. They need to be asked, so that they get a chance to decide whether they want to want to assist, or they want to turn this down. So I would encourage that we try to do that kind of thing. That's enough for me. Thank you folks. Unknown Speaker 2:04:16 I got one thing. Well, I'm Garrett and I and Erica Bartlett with Tacoma tenants organizing committee have been working to create a draft. This week to produce a letter campaign so emailing officials about trying to stop the cuts for the civil rights investigator positions. Just be looking out for that to sign and share with your networks if you're interested on. I hope is to drop it on Monday, but might be Tuesday. Um, Yeah, the more emails, the better. Unknown Speaker 2:04:50 And, yeah, I agree without and all of this, that he just said Yeah. Unknown Speaker 2:04:59 So I think anybody Maureen Howard 2:05:03 candidate forums, maybe I missed somebody in the chat said they'd like to take it on. Rob Huff - MDC 2:05:11 If you did miss anything. I'm going to be saving the chat so we can kind of take a look back at, make sure we capture all the information from today so I didn't see it pop up a Unknown Speaker 2:05:23 couple of us had a private conversation about it and decided to take it to the planning group after this meeting. Great. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 2:05:33 Great like networking at the time of COVID a little more awkward than it is in real life, so that's fun. I'm curious those that have updates for the good the order to share those that have come to the end of the meeting, we are going to hang tight for for a group of us after the meeting. But, so you're welcome to stay and learn how the sausage is made. And otherwise, I appreciate that buddy. Oh, sorry, whoever was going to jump in, Unknown Speaker 2:05:57 this was, this is rosemary and I was just going to ask Teresa to encourage people to participate in some of her merrymaking projects. So maybe you could do that just briefly. Unknown Speaker 2:06:10 Okay, so, um, just to let people know we are still creating those packets for people who are newly housed. So, if you, if you have somebody we can't outfit a whole apartment or anything but we gather things like we have some air mats and we have some kitchen utensils and we have some sheets and towels and things like that. So, Unknown Speaker 2:06:30 let us know. Unknown Speaker 2:06:33 They're kind of starter kits, and we give people what we have. So sometimes we have a whole bunch of stuff and sometimes all we can give them as an air mattress and a pot with a lid, but at least we have something to offer. Also, we are still doing the creativity kits, so those are right now, it's limited to these card making kits that are free to people. You just have to let us know you need them. There's nothing there to make like 10 cards and there's something to do when someone's trapped in a space, and they have a little creative juice. We are going to start gearing up in October for the 99 stocking which I don't know if it's going to become 250 bags or what it's going to become given what's happening right now but we will be doing something there. And so think about us when you come across things like you find 100 combs or you find, you know, you see a sale for 50, chocolate sanas not yet but in November. Anyway, think about us and know that I will be calling on you to see if you're willing to help, and also to let us know where, where to distribute some of those that are no longer going to be able to be distributed at. It'll be a smaller number at some of the places we've done it for before. Anyway, call on me also if you have some creative idea. And I have so many people giving us donations. I would love to find a better way to distribute them and I have a few ideas. So, I'd love to hear from people who are interested in engaging in that kind of redistribution of good things that fall on our heads. Unknown Speaker 2:08:13 That's kind of it. Awesome. Rob Huff - MDC 2:08:16 And in case you didn't see it in the chat Kenny Coble actually offered an update on a reminder community forum at the Tacoma city council is going to be on September 15. This next month, as opposed to the second Tuesday that it usually is. So thanks for letting us know that Kenny. Unknown Speaker 2:08:37 I Teresa, Teresa This is Carolyn. Unknown Speaker 2:08:42 And we had that issue with furniture being available and not having a place to put it. And we found out that there's a Northwest furniture bank available and Tacoma for furnishing people with a permanent. Unknown Speaker 2:08:59 Right. and that is actually if people don't know about that program it's a great program it was shut down for a little while, when COVID first hit, but the thing with that is it's a one time, option for people who can go in and if somebody is more familiar this with this than I am, please jump in and correct me but this is we are a referral agency for them so people can go one time in their life. And there's a fee, which sometimes agencies will cover for people to help them get their furniture, but they can come in and take that there's a certain amount they can get depending on how many members are in the family. That's a much more formal thing where it's like for your whole household and there are some requirements around it that a lot of people who are just coming from attend to an apartment. That's not going to work for them, but it's a work it works great for people who are going into, like they have a whole family in there, and they want to use their once in a lifetime shot for that furniture. So, these are really two separate issues and make sense. Anyone want to add anything about the Northwest furniture bank. Unknown Speaker 2:10:13 I have multiple clients that I've used it multiple times. Maureen Howard 2:10:16 So it's not just once in a lifetime Unknown Speaker 2:10:18 to. Oh, yeah. Oh really, they changed. Unknown Speaker 2:10:22 Well you can get a waiver so it depends on the circumstances why typically the rule is one time and it's encouraged to be one time because of their entire availabilities based off donations right so, but they do have a waiver process to allow folks to use it more than one time, and they can take whatever is on the referral form. So if a client says they need a TV stand dishes, a TV if that material is available, they can actually take all of those things. The big kicker is there are two things one you either have to pay for delivery which is like 25 or $50. But you cannot miss the appointment. And that's where some folks have a barrier so when I was at my former nonprofit. They, we would drive clients directly there and that way they didn't miss that appointment, but it's just a real big communication thing but you can get tables, chairs beds mattresses, they actually take donated mattresses and rebuild them so that they are completely cleaned out like no risk of bedbugs it's very phenomenal system. And I encourage anyone who isn't eligible to refer folks to Northwest furniture bank to contact them. It's a 30 minute training, and then you can actually be a referral to Northwest furniture and for your own clients or for folks in the community that you work with. Unknown Speaker 2:11:34 Yeah, we could get the word out. It'd be nice to get the word out for people to know they can donate there too because I had a bunch of furniture I would have loved to have given them. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 2:11:47 I want to jump on with what Valerie said the cost can be frightening. I hate to say this, it's $225 for Northwest furniture bank to deliver. And it's $125, if you provide your own vehicle that has to be covered. There are some caveats. So just want to make sure that people are aware, going in that there is a cost, and then like Teresa said, sometimes the agencies will pick up the cost of the pickup and delivery. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 2:12:25 But there's one thing at Northwest furniture bank there's a little difference now that the virus is here. You can no longer go in and pick your furniture out. I can turn in a referral, and they'll pick your furniture out for you. And if you pick it up, then they'll set it out and bring it to you, but you're no longer able to go in and roam around, and that changed since they opened back up. Unknown Speaker 2:12:53 Thanks. Jeffrey that's great to know. Maureen Howard 2:12:55 So what would be the most efficient. Real Time way of making information like this conversation that just happened that took like four people having a piece of the information available to people, providers who need it. I don't know the answer I'm just asking the question. Unknown Speaker 2:13:19 Yeah, I was wondering if we could ever like a Facebook page for people that need resources and they can just get it, I don't know, I think that's a good point. Unknown Speaker 2:13:30 So, most providers are actually already referral mechanisms to Northwest furniture bank it's pretty uncommon for a homeless service provider not to have a direct link, maybe a new case manager hasn't had that part of their onboarding yet, but most providers in Pierce County are actually direct referral sources to Northwest furniture bank already. I think we need to share it more broadly than the more Sorry, I constantly watch the chat box and it takes my distraction. So I think we need to spread it more broadly through Coalition's to continuum of cares through school districts that kind of a situation and northwest furniture rank has flyers and systems that we get emailed out as part of just communication, but most of our providers are already in the system. Maureen Howard 2:14:17 I appreciate that they're in the system as referrals. But I think those were providers who had pieces of how it operates what it costs. So it's a matter of changes how are. Anyway, Unknown Speaker 2:14:37 I can tell you for a fact that my case managers, they know all the details, I don't. Maureen Howard 2:14:44 Yeah, which means the right people have the information Yeah, the right people get the information. Fair enough James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 2:14:53 for us to bring in the northwest furniture bank in the future to do a presentation on what they do and all that stuff so that's good. it's good to have this discussion and we all kind of shared our pieces of the pie and now we'll go to the source and have them do a presentation in the near future. Rob Huff - MDC 2:15:08 That'd be great. James Pogue - Comprehensive Life Resources 2:15:10 Well, we've hit the 11 o'clock I can't believe we kept 32 people chatting through that. That was awesome. Some of us are staying on to talk about like how what and how we can fumble through this again next week for the rest of you if you guys want to join and say that you want to participate in helping us coordinate all the things that we're doing, you're welcome to stay I think we're gonna take a few minute break before we started that conversation so my screen is gonna go dark so I can run to the bathroom, but for everyone else and those that are gonna stay on I'll see you soon and it was a great Friday thank you guys so much for a good first post Garrett meeting. Transcribed by https://otter.ai