Director April Calvin of the Office of Homeless Services (OHS) presented an update on the department's first 10 months, including key statistics, program achievements, and budget needs. Council committee members asked questions about data collection, funding sustainability, outreach, and specific programs like the cold weather shelter and Strobel Center. No formal votes were taken; the presentation was informational with discussions of future funding requests.
Greetings, Metro Council, and thank you, Madam Chair, for having us today. Thank you for allowing us to have the opportunity to discuss our budgetary needs as a new department. We're eager to share all of the great strides that we've made within the last 10 months. I would like to thank the mayor Freddie O'Connell administration and our community partners, along with the OHS employees that work diligently to save the lives of the unhoused Nashville neighbors. This work is not done in a silo. Here's a list of our carefully constructed leadership team. The entire OHS team consists of 29 employees, three grant funded positions, and six ARPA funded positions. Here to my right, um, our leadership team consists of assistant director of finance and administration, Joseph Marsh, Alison Cantway is our assistant director of planning and research, and Dr. Marvin Trotter is our assistant director of programs. We also have a very new public information officer, Demetrius Cheney. Leading the convening and planning process of homeless efforts, we are honored to operate the comprehensive community database. You hear us talk about HMIS quite often, which is homeless and management information systems. We have improved our data entry, access, collection, and overall quality within the last two years. Currently conducting a test run on syncing and importing data from the largest shelter here in Nashville. This is the first of its history for HMIS in Nashville. With this, we would provide a more comprehensive deep dive into the aggregated data and the compelling anecdotal stories behind our city's homeless crisis. OHS operates the coordinated entry process, which provides access to available resources and services here in Nashville for the most vulnerable population. We cannot assist with housing individuals as swiftly as we do if we did not have such a robust landlord engagement process. Allowing for more efficient coordinated efforts and allowing for swift access to services regardless of which agency that individual is connected with. So all of that to say we are the coordinators, we help guide, and we help implement programs here in Nashville. There's a little bit of the stats. 2024 in March, disproportionately, our unhoused population consisted of 53% African American. And the last year, our community closed four encampments, providing housing solutions for 189 individuals with a 90% retention rate, meaning that they have remained in housing or in the temporary options that were afforded to them when the camp was deemed or it was decommissioned. Also, that's just a small portion of the work that's being completed throughout the year. In the last 12 months, our community has assisted with housing 1,927 people. With the assistance of our community partners, I would like to thank them for their hard work and their efforts. Nashville is embarking on baseline data elements for true for a true depiction on homelessness here in Nashville. Reported in a story last night, chronic homelessness is on the rise. Unfortunately, people have languaged outside for an average of five years and just now being entered into our database within the last two years. This marks them as experiencing first-time homelessness. And unfortunately, this is an inaccurate depiction of our current state, but rather the results of increased data collection and robust efforts to improve our data process. Prior to the last two years, prior to two years ago, the community was housing an average of 16 people per month experiencing HUD's definition of chronic homelessness. We now average 35 to 40 per month, with last month being an all-time high. We housed 70 people experiencing chronic homelessness out of the 185 that were provided housing last month. This is a great testament to the work of our coordinated entry process, to our community's strategic plan, and the hard work of our community partners. So as I said last month, 185 people were housed. 70 of them were experiencing chronic level homelessness. So for every one person that's housed, 2.5 are entering into homelessness, either from loss of housing, displacement from family and community, or first-time entry into our system due to better data collection. The robust efforts of data collection aligns with our community strategic plan, and we take pride in that. So from 2023 to 2024, disproportionately, of course, but proportionately in our service delivery. And the encampment strategy did not affect those numbers. Partnering with community providers to commit while partnering with community providers, we are committed to identifying solutions to decrease the inflow into homelessness and maximize the outflow into permanent housing. Here are a few of our collaborative partners. We have 42 partners that utilize the homeless management information system. Definitely, I cannot leave you without talking about some of our great achievements. And the last 10 months, we experienced huge wins. As stated before, we we're finalizing phase one of our newly created Office of Homeless Services. We're entering into phase two, which is really securing that baseline of accurate robust data as demonstrated by receiving our first sample of data from the largest shelter to sync within our system. OHS hosted a housing first conference with 250 people in attendance. We sold out in a sold out.