Sneak Preview: PHA/CoC Partnerships Urged To Assist the Homeless
(The following was excerpted from a Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently updated its guidance on housing individuals and families experiencing homelessness for public housing agencies (PHAs) administering the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) and/or Public Housing programs. Among the revisions, HUD encouraged collaborations with Continuums of Care (CoCs), provided numerous suggestions on ways to better manage waiting lists, and called for PHAs to address racial equity in their housing preference system.
The guidance, which supersedes previous guidance in PIH Notice 2013-15, encourages partnerships between PHAs and CoCs (i.e., nonprofits, businesses, social services providers, etc. working to address homelessness within a community), stating that such “critical” partnerships allow the organizations to leverage their resources to better serve individuals and families experiencing homelessness.
Such partnerships can allow PHAs and CoCs to: (1) share best practices; (2) identify and prioritize people experiencing homelessness for assistance; (3) provide documentation for verification purposes; and (4) share information on the physical location of people experiencing homelessness to ensure services can be provided. “HUD strongly encourages PHAs and CoCs to proactively engage in partnerships since the communities that have been most successful in working toward ending homelessness are those where PHAs form direct partnerships with the local CoC, homeless service providers and other agencies,” the guidance adds.
The guidance emphasizes that CoCs and PHAs are required to create policies and procedures regarding how data is collected, used, stored and disclosed across the homeless services system, and that these policies must protect clients’ personally identifying information, and should follow the guiding principle to only share the minimum amount of data necessary to achieve specific program purposes. “CoCs and PHAs must be transparent in the data collection process and articulate the policies to clients in a way that they understand, and clients must be protected from denial of services they would otherwise qualify for if they do not consent to data collection or sharing,” according to the guidance.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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