News: Reserve a Shelter Bed in Berkeley

From the Spring 2009 Newsletter

This year, Berkeley Food and Housing Project (BFHP) launched a new City of Berkeley Centralized Bed Reservation System pilot project. Funded by Berkeley’s “Public Commons for Everyone Initiative” (PCEI), the program is designed to ensure that every shelter bed in Berkeley is given out each and every night, that the Berkeley Police and Mobile Crisis teams have accurate daily information about emergency bed availability, that homeless prevention services be offered if feasible, and that everyone have a single point of contact for daily shelter bed space, seven days per week.

During 2008, BFHP worked in close collaboration with Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS), the City of Berkeley Housing Department, county Homeless Management and Information Systems (HMIS) team to create the new online bed reservation system using the Shelter Point system.

The main highlights of the project are as follows:
• Reservations for all three Berkeley shelters are now handled by BFHP
• There are now two daily (Monday through Friday) reservation periods for homeless folks to receive a bed – at Noon and at 7:00PM. The second reservation period allows bed openings caused by “no-shows" to be filled. (prior to this system, beds were filled either once a day or weekly with no beds filled on weekends or holidays)
• Weekend shelter bed reservations open at 10 AM Saturday and Sundays.
• There is now a single point of contact for after-hours emergency bed requests by Berkeley Police, Mobile Crisis, hospitals, jails, and others

The new system is also set up to integrate the beds at the Winter Shelter, which BFHP also coordinates for Berkeley. For further information on the system, contact Sharon Alford at (510) 649-4976. To refer someone to a Berkeley shelter, please use the new toll free number
(866) 960-2132.