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Facilitate.com helps homeless services providers collaborate
to acquire more funding for all
The Challenge
The potential for collaboration software
to enhance inter-organizational communication is significant.
One area where such collaboration makes sense is among
community nonprofits working towards similar goals.
The Collaboration Technologies for Organizations Serving
the Homeless (CTOSH) project represents an innovative
relationship between academia and local health and
human service organizations--including The University
of Texas at Austin and approximately 30 government
and nonprofit organizations in the Austin area who
serve persons in homeless situations. The purpose of
the CTOSH project is to provide technology to homeless
service providers to help them work
cooperatively
in order
to maximize a rapidly dwindling supply of financial
and other resources.
As a service to the
community, Facilitate.com made a grant to provide
8.5 brainstorming and decision making tools to these
organizations.
One of the first and most extensive
opportunities came in the Summer of 2003. The City
of Austin Health and Human Services Division (HHSD)
coordinates many efforts in the community of homeless
service providers in the area. Most directly, the Homeless
Self Sufficiency and Responsibility Initiative is a
program developed by the Health and Human Services
Division that offers collective assistance to Austin’s
homeless. Although the primary source of funding for
the Homeless Initiative is the investment of the City
of Austin and Travis County, local homeless service
providers can acquire additional funding through Continuum
of Care for Homeless Assistance Grants from the United
States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The application for Continuum of Care Assistance requires
extensive collection of data from all homeless service
providers in Austin and Travis County. This information
must then be evaluated to assess the gaps in the Continuum
of Care for the area.
The Choice
In past years, the HHSD directed
the assemblage of this data through printed surveys
mailed to organizations. The survey must amass data
that reflects the number of homeless people receiving
services from local organizations, services available
for each subpopulation of homeless, and the needs of
homeless people by subpopulation. The agency would
then have to spend hours tracking down each survey
before it could begin the process of compiling the
responses. HHSD needed a way to collect, compile, and
analyze data from multiple organizations that would
not consume the agency’s valuable hours. Thanks
to the CTOSH project, HHSD decided that the Facilitate.com
Survey tool could provide exactly what was needed to
gather this information.
The Solution
CTOSH assisted HHSD with the design
of a survey that satisfied the requirements of the Continuum
of Care application. Once all the components of the
Survey were finalized, Austin homeless service providers
were directed to complete the online questionnaire.
Participants were e-mailed reminders about the survey
with the Facilitate.com link to ensure response. HHSD
Coordinator Mary Rychlik remarked, “We’ve
spent hours in prior years calling people to remind
them to complete the survey and mail it back to us;
last year, we simply e-mailed them, and they could complete
it and submit it quickly and easily online. What a time
saver!” With the survey results table, the
survey total were also made available online to the
community organizations wishing to view that information.
The Results
Once the surveys were collected,
a Gaps Analysis for the Continuum of Care application
was developed based on the responses assembled by the
Facilitate.com survey tool. From the account, HHSD
was able to report vital statistics including estimated
need, current inventory, and priority of available
resources for a variety of homeless subpopulations
in Austin and Travis County. The survey results enabled
HHSD to modify the Homeless Initiative to better serve
the requirements of a Continuum of Care. After review
of the application, the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development awarded City of Austin and Travis
County programs approximately $4.2 million to address
the development of projects to assist the homeless.
This subsidy was used specifically to ameliorate transitional
housing, emergency shelter, and employment support
service programs for all homeless subpopulations including
families.
As CTOSH Co-director Dr. Craig Scott noted, “We
wanted to provide Facilitate.com to this community
because of its many uses—including both online
surveys and collaborative decision making, which we
anticipate this group of organizations using in the
near future.” In short, Facilitate.com provided
this community of service providers with a tool that
helped them to more efficiently and accurately acquire
the information they needed to secure this major federal
funding. “That’s real bottom-line results,” says
Scott, “and Facilitate.com helped make that
possible.”
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