Okay, so good morning.

I call the health committee order for Monday, July 13th.

Supervisor TAM.

Present.

Supervisor Miley.

We have a quorum.

Okay.

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Okay.

So we have one item this morning.

Continuum of care 2026 notice of funding opportunity update.

All righty.

Good morning, Supervisors.

Jonathan Russell, director for Alabama County Health's Housing and Homelessness Services.

Thank you for having me here this morning to provide a timely update on the majority funding source we have for federal funding for homelessness.

This year we are currently in the process of completing the notice of funding opportunity local ranking review process.

So excited to give you an update on all the relevant factors and changes and potential implications.

And I believe the PowerPoint should be coming.

Thank you.

Oops, looks like it has the me versus a presentation.

So in terms of overview, as I said, we'll briefly run through uh the COC funding process.

Uh give you some detail on the implications for the 2026 NOFO, and then talk a little bit about our current state local rank and review process and end with some uh timelines for next steps.

Next slide.

So beginning with the funding process, uh just starting with as always in our field, uh just refreshing on some frequently used acronyms here.

When we say COC, we mean the Continuum of Care, which is that federally designated body that receives the funding in our county.

Uh the local Alameda County continuum of care is contiguous with our county borders.

Uh HUD, of course, is the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development who funds uh the Continuum of Care program.

And then the NOFO, as we say for short, is the notice of funding opportunity.

It's a term used for a lot of different programs, but for today, we mean specifically that notice for the continuum of care funding that happens each year.

Next slide.

So what is the NOFO?

As I said, it's an annual competitive grant process from the federal department of housing and urban development.

Distributes uh billions of dollars in federal funding.

I believe this year the federal, the annual total is 4.3 billion dollars to local organizations and governments to address homelessness.

We apply through the regional continuum of care, as I said in our case, contiguous with Alameda County.

And then the COC then evaluates and ranks and submits a consolidated application for the entire region.

In our continuum of care, the leadership board of the COC appoints people for a specific committee, the NOFO committee that does that evaluation and ranking process.

So essentially, there's two stages to the process.

There's a local process to rank and review applications, and then of course there's a federal uh process where we submit it and then uh the feds review it.

Next slide.

So the local COC competition process, this is required.

We have to we have to distribute the funds annually.

So in that sense, funds can't be banked.

They need to be accrued and spent within the year.

So each COC has to run a local process, as I said, to decide how to allocate its funding between either renewal projects or new grants to fund new services.

HUD establishes each year the overarching rules for each continuum of care and what they must follow in designing that local application process.

In a typical cycle, so in previous years, up through last year, which I had shared an update, there was some intended changes last year.

In a typical process, COCs have been historically incentivized to renew existing projects, unless there were significant performance issues.

So essentially, as I've shared in the past, though it is an annual competition, we have been renewing grants some for 15-20 years as a really stable funding source for ongoing existing projects to sustain their services.

However, in this year, in fiscal year 20, the 2026 NOFO, COCs are strongly incentivized to create new projects and renew significantly fewer projects.

Next slide.

So here are the kind of relevant roles to this local process.

Again, there's the Continuum of Care Leadership Board that approves the strategic direction for the local competition, and then it ultimately approves the final project priority list.

That is the final list of applications that goes as a part of the consolidated application to HUD.

The leadership board also seats the NOFO response team, the NRT and the NOVO committee.

The NOFO response team is really that smaller body that really develops and implements the strategic response to the NOFO with close input from the NOFO committee.