Provide guidance on how communities create and scale crisis systems
There will always be individuals and families who will experience housing crises. How local communities and the federal government define and identify the end of homelessness is of the utmost importance as it provides clear, numeric goals and a baseline from which a community can design a crisis response system in which a family or individual spends little or no time homeless following a housing crisis. The plan needs to provide guidance to communities on what the essential elements of a crisis response system are and how communities can determine the appropriate scale of those elements given local housing and economic conditions. Integrated data systems and a universal screening tool embedded in mainstream programs could be valuable tools is assessing the needed scale of a crisis response system where a family or individual who has a housing crisis spends little to no time literally homeless.
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Anonymous commented
This recommendation is very similar to "Promote the use of local data to evaluate current system-level outcomes and costs and to inform reallocation strategies" and perhaps should be combined. Bringing a system to scale involves evaluation, outcomes, and reallocation strategies. Bringing a housing crisis response system to scale is the work that every community should be doing to end homelessness and achieve functional zero.
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N J Sherman commented
"Integrated data systems and a universal screening tool embedded in mainstream programs could be valuable tools..."
Yes!