For several years, TAC consultants have been on a journey with communities to create effective, sound Coordinated Entry (CE) systems and processes that contribute to their larger goal of ending homelessness. As the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) January 23, 2018 deadline for Coordinated Entry compliance nears, we want to share some planning tips that we have seen contribute to creative and efficient systems.

Align Your Local Goals to End Homelessness WITH HUD’s Goals for Coordinated Entry

We often see communities concerned about the compliance aspect of Coordinated Entry, which leads them to direct planning efforts toward the goal of “checking off the boxes” of Coordinated Entry requirements. We challenge communities instead to consider Coordinated Entry a powerful tool in their efforts to end homelessness. HUD promotes some key strategies that really are essential in reducing and ending homelessness, such as ensuring that all processes are as low-barrier as possible, implementing uniform assessment to ensure uniform decision-making across systems, and prioritizing assistance to the most vulnerable. Some planning activities to align your own local goals with the goals of Coordinated Entry might be helpful:

• Create a crosswalk between key goals in your local strategic plan to end homelessness and those in HUD’s Coordinated Entry Notice.
• Spend some time with your stakeholders envisioning your ideal system for any consumer. Draw on this process to create a list of values that will guide decision-making throughout the CE planning process.
• Engage local funders to be part of planning efforts by finding alignment between their goals and your CE goals.

Integrate Change Management Strategies into Planning

Implementing Coordinated Entry is a significant systems change, and will continue to have effects long past a community’s first iteration of CE. It is important to acknowledge the shift that stakeholders will undergo, and to use change management strategies that can strengthen the planning process:

• Continually acknowledge the change that is happening. This will start to normalize the process, making the reality of systems change familiar to your stakeholders.
• Engage your stakeholders in creating the system, or in problem-solving any challenges that arise. People often respond better to change if they are part of the thought process, rather than having change forced upon them.
• Work to create a culture of innovation and “failing forward.” It’s good to make use of reference materials to guide Coordinated Entry planning processes, but the bottom line is that there is no pre-packaged Coordinated Entry system with assembly instructions. Each community must figure out what works given its own local stakeholders, populations, and conditions. A learning culture that celebrates innovation can help to promote new ideas and reduce negative backlash toward methods that were tried but did not succeed. We are seeing this type of culture work well particularly in the development of diversion techniques within Coordinated Entry.

Promote Fidelity to Housing First

The guiding principles of the Housing First philosophy are critical to creating flow through your Coordinated Entry system. Practices such as lowering barriers to housing admission, creating housing pathways and processes with a commitment to referral success, fostering participant choice, prioritizing assistance to the most vulnerable, and terminating participants from housing programs only in the most egregious cases not only create system flow, but also poise communities to improve their success in several of HUD’s system performance measures. To maintain fidelity to Housing First, there are several actions your community can take:

• Incorporate consumers into your planning process. Communities have found many ways to infuse consumer voices into planning in a meaningful way. Often the key is to employ several strategies at once: hold multiple seats for consumers on your planning committees and Continuum of Care board; create a consumer advisory body to receive an even more diverse set of viewpoints; hold focus groups with consumers who may not be able to commit to an ongoing committee, but who would like to give input; and compensate consumers for their time.
• Continually assess programs’ fidelity to Housing First. Programs may incorporate self-assessments, such as the Housing First Assessment recently released by HUD, to gauge current fidelity and identify areas for improvement. Many communities have also found success in setting up learning collaboratives for both frontline and manager-level program staff to share strategies in implementing a Housing First philosophy.
• Get funders trained and engaged in Housing First. At TAC, we have done substantial work with communities’ funders to assist them in aligning their contracts, performance targets, and monitoring processes with the Housing First philosophy. Getting funders on board helps with the promotion of Housing First not only at a program level, but at a systems level.

We are continually impressed by the perseverance we have seen in communities to create Coordinated Entry systems and processes that can drive progress towards ending homelessness. We look forward to continuing to learn alongside you!