Alachua County Commission hears report on homeless street outreach, directs staff to extend contract with street outreach team and coordinate with surrounding counties

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At their October 8 meeting, the Alachua County Commission heard a presentation on homeless outreach across the Continuum of Care (CoC) service area and voted to extend the street outreach contract, coordinate with surrounding counties, and ask the CoC to come back with plans to implement the recommendations in the presentation.

National Alliance to End Homelessness presentation

The County engaged with the National Alliance to End Homelessness to evaluate their street outreach effort, and their representative Diiv Sternman presented their three main findings. 

First, Sternman said the County has an “excellent street outreach program, and I don’t think I can say that strongly enough… They’re operating with a high fidelity to evidence-based practices that work for engaging folks who are living unsheltered and for moving folks into housing successfully. They’re housing 39% of their program participants directly from the street, and that is higher than we see in almost any high-functioning street outreach program across the country… But they’re severely under-resourced… and that was true just in the city of Gainesville, and it became even more true when we… look farther out into the rural counties.” Sternman also said that access to street outreach in Bradford, Gilchrist, Levy, and Putnam Counties is inadequate; all of those are under the same Continuum of Care umbrella as Alachua County.

The second finding was that there is an absence of reliable data on rural homelessness: “If we don’t know what homelessness looks like and we can’t quantify it, it’s very, very hard to plan and scale services appropriately.” Sternman said the Point in Time counts generally don’t capture people in rural areas and there is no way to refer people to the Continuum of Care system in rural areas. 

The third finding was that there is a need for relationship-building across the CoC, with nearly half of the service providers saying they had disengaged or had been excluded from CoC activities in which they had an interest. Providers said they hoped the transition to the new lead agency would be a “key opportunity” for improvement. 

Recommendations

Sternman provided 15 recommendations focused on developing an “effective, efficient, and equitable housing-focused street outreach strategy” and implementing CoC best practices. The recommendations included “supporting and scaling your current street outreach programming and then making sure that you’re scaling housing programs and solutions alongside crisis solutions like street outreach and shelter.”

Sternman said the County needs to be “cultivating an inclusive COC culture. That… means improving engagement of people with lived experience and leveraging their expertise for both generating accurate data and employing evidence-based services for folks who are unsheltered currently. And it also means you need to be able to look at your data and look at it across different demographics…. There are huge disparities in who is receiving services and who is succeeding… You need to be able to disaggregate your data by race, by gender, by family status, and other features of your homeless population in order to be able to understand how your strategies are working for those different groups.”

Motion

Commissioner Anna Prizzia acknowledged that the CoC doesn’t answer to the County Commission but made a motion to ask the CoC to come back early in 2025 with “some recommendations around how they can revise that strategic plan to include community engagement, both with stakeholders that could participate in the CoC as well as those with lived experience.”

Prizzia: “Almost every single door I knock, homelessness is an issue on the tip of their minds”

Prizzia added, “I think the story of homelessness in our community is rapidly deteriorating.” She said that when she knocks on doors, “almost every single door I knock, homelessness is an issue on the tip of their minds and the tip of their tongues and they want to know what we’re doing about it, and it’s not clear to anyone in our community what’s happening. So it doesn’t mean we’re not doing a good job – clearly, we are – but we’re not doing a very good job of telling our story.” She also asked the CoC to “create solid metrics” to help with decision-making and to help prioritize funding.

Commissioner Ken Cornell suggested having joint meetings with the four other counties in the CoC to find ways to collaborate.

Jacob Turner: Members of the community can join the CoC

Jacob Turner from the CoC invited “the community and our Alachua County residents to be engaged, join the CoC as a community member, participate in our planning committees and meetings so that they have a voice in the decisions that are being brought before you, such as the one today.”

Amended motion

Cornell asked Prizzia to add direction to staff to plan for joint meetings with the other four counties in the CoC “at some point in the coming year.”

Prizzia agreed and also added direction to staff to help the CoC with hosting a community engagement workshop and to extend the contract with the street outreach team in the amount of $350,000.

Alachua County Community Support Services Director Claudia Tuck said her staff recommends moving that contract to the new CoC lead, TaskForce Fore Ending Homelessness. Prizzia responded, “So the same provider would be doing the work, but the contract would go through an organization that would allow for more coordination and facilitation.” She amended her motion to continue to provide $350,000 for street outreach in coordination with the CoC and GRACE. Cornell seconded the motion.

Prizzia: “We’re starting to see the street homelessness issue proliferate out into our rural areas”

Assistant County Manager Tommy Crosby said that the $350,000 was already put into the FY25 budget as a placeholder. Prizzia said, “I think it’s important for us to keep funding this… It’s not even enough money.” She said, “I’m hearing that… just outside our urbanized area,… out in our urbanized areas of Jonesville and stuff, we’re starting to see the street homelessness issue proliferate out into our rural areas, and so I think we are going to have to look at the budget shortfalls there.”

Future City of Gainesville allocations to GRACE may depend on regaining control of GRU

In response to a question from Cornell, GRACE Executive Director Jon DeCarmine said the City of Gainesville has allocated $2.05 million for a one-year contract with GRACE for low-barrier emergency shelter services and campus and day services for unsheltered people on the GRACE campus through September 30, 2025. He said his impression was that the City was waiting for “answers to some of the financial questions that have popped up with the issues around GRU” and that “this was not the year to lock in a rate that would really meet the needs of the community for the next five years.” He said he was hoping to negotiate a five-year contract for the following years.

Cornell said they would “see what happens in November,” presumably with the ballot measure that would return control of GRU to the City Commission, along with the ability to determine the fund transfer from GRU to the City’s General Fund.

DeCarmine: Street outreach will lead to fewer homeless people on the streets

During public comment on the motion, DeCarmine said that when people have “a problem with homelessness,… they’re talking about the people that they see out on the street. Street outreach is what solves that problem.” He said the current team is generating eight times the outcomes of similar-sized communities with about 1/8 of the usual staffing. He said additional staffing for the team and additional permanent supportive housing units will make a big difference; the County currently has 16 units, but the three buildings that have been purchased by the County are expected to be in use by the end of 2025 or in early 2026.

Second amended motion

After further discussion, Prizzia said it was “taking forever” to develop permanent supportive housing units and added a piece to her motion to direct staff to come up with a plan to “begin to have more conversations with landlords and service providers to create opportunities for landlords to step up and provide us with spaces, and what do we need to do to help them feel comfortable doing that?” Cornell agreed as the seconder.

The motion passed unanimously.