Measuring Success: 2010 Progress Report on Ending Homelessness in Alameda County

Acknowledgements

This report is the culmination of nearly three years of work on behalf of local providers and funders to identify outcome measures from the individual program level to the system as a whole that would allow the community to understand its progress toward ending homelessness and be accountable for achieving success. The data in this report represents an important milestone in the use of the local Homeless Management Information System (HMIS).

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The EveryOne Home Plan to prevent and end homelessness in Alameda County by the year 2020 was published in 2006. Since then EveryOne Home and community stakeholders have been working hard to honor the Plan’s charge to “measure success and report outcomes,” the fourth of the plan’s five major strategies.

Given the multi-year nature of this effort, the community chose to focus on the following year one priorities:

Reducing rates of exit from programs to unknown destinations
Beginning outcomes tracking within agencies
Preparing for HMIS generated outcomes reporting to jurisdictional funders
Ensuring complete and accurate data input
Improving rates of homeless persons accessing permanent housing and doing so more quickly
Developing and producing outcome reports to be generated by InHOUSE

EveryOne Home can report substantial progress on all year one priorities:

Exits to unknown destinations dropped from 42% to 19% for all exits across the system.
All providers using Alameda County’s local HMIS (InHOUSE) can generate a standard outcome report that captures nearly 85% of the sector-specific outcome and efficiency measures adopted in May 2010. Several local funders have incorporated the outcomes into their funding contracts for the current fiscal year and are accepting HMIS reports as progress reports.
Many agencies have undergone substantial data cleaning guided by new policies for exiting inactive program participants within specific timeframes. HMIS data is more complete and accurate than it has ever been.
The system demonstrated an 18% increase in the rate of persons exiting programs with permanent housing from 28% in 2009 to 33% in 2010.
This report is the product of data reports generated by Alameda County’s HMIS, which enables us to look at individual program, sector, and system wide performance with de-duplicated counts for individuals served.

Downloads

Download a PDF of the full report: Measuring Progress – Achieving Outcomes: 2010 Progress Report on
Ending Homelessness in Alameda County, CA
Answers to Community Questions [PDF]