Transcripts For SFGTV Our City Our Home Oversight Committee

SFGTV Our City Our Home Oversight Committee July 12, 2024

Committee is authorized to meet in person. Each speaker will be allowed three minutes to speak. You can call 4156550001. Again, its 4156550001, access code 1461188903. Then press pound and pound again. When connected, you will hear the meeting discussions, but you will be muted and in listening mode only. When your item of interest comes up, dial star 3 to be added to the speaker line. Best practices are to call from a quiet location, speak clearly and slowly and turn down your television or radio. Alternatively, you may submit Public Comment by email and it will be forwarded to the committee and will be included as part of the official file. Please note this meeting is recorded and will be available at sfgov. Org. Were going to call the meeting to order. Its october 20, 2020. Please call the roll. [roll call] great, at this time we have a quorum. Thank you, well now move into item two for Public Comment. Do we have any Public Comment at this time . So item number two, opportunity for the public to comment on any matters within the committees jurisdiction that is not on the agenda. Access code is 1461188903. Then press pound and pound again. If you havent done so, please dial star 3 to line up to speak. A system prompt will indicate that you have raised your hand. Please wait until the system indicates you have been unmuted and you may begin your comment. Please note you will have three minutes. Im checking now to see if there is anyone raising their hand. We have one. Im going to go ahead and unmute this person and this person can speak for three minutes. Good morning. My name is sandra. Im a leader in faith and action bay area and st. James epis can poll church. Im here with other leaders in faith and action. Faith and action bay area is a network of over 100 congregations and individual Community Leaders in San Francisco and san mateo county, working to uphold the dignity of all people. We are a multiracial, multiling gal, and cross Class Organization thats led by those most effected by injustice, such as low income renters, workers, immigrants, women and youth. We are bound together by a shared commitment to ensuring the full rights involve people in our community and the desire to connect our spiritual belief with our civic actions and practices. Prior to the pandemic, our Housing Advocacy focused on city rent subsidies for low income seniors at risk of becoming unhoused. From the experience of our latinx leaders in the Mission District find themselves unable to meet the requirements to obtain the Affordable Housing opening in their neighborhood. The pandemic expanded our scope of issues as we made outreach calls to the community and heard that the priority of rent subsidies was now joined with our dire need to obtain safe for our neighborhoods. It turned into our campaign for no seniors without homes with three priorities, moving vulnerable homeless seniors to hotels as an emergency measure, assuring they can move into safe permanent housing when their time in the hotels ends and continuing focus on preventing vulnerable seniors from falling into homelessness. We are currently phone banking around the election, which is a great opportunity to do further listing in our community on issues of highest priority to them. Many of the issues coming forward will relate to the work of this committee. You have a unique opportunity to address the issue of homelessness in San Francisco by creating new and accountable mechanisms for financing and delivering services. We will be walking you through this process, providing you input along the way. We look forward to your good work and the day we can be together in person. Thank you. Thank you. So are there any further Public Comments . Give me one second. Hello caller . No, there is no Public Comment at this point. Okay, thank you. Well move into item 3, approval with modification of the minutes from september 16th. Is there a motion . Andrews, so moved. Is there a second . Second it. Moved and seconded. Any discussion . All in favor say aye. Aye. Sorry, this is john sorry to interrupt. Before the vote on each item, you should take Public Comment. You had general Public Comment at the start but for each item, sometimes during the discussion or any time before you take any vote, the committee needs to take Public Comment. Okay. So any Public Comment . Members of the public who wish to provide Public Comment on this item should call. If you havent already done so, press star 3 to line up to speak. Please wait until the system indicates you have been unmuted and you may begin your comments. Please note that you will have three minutes. Give me one minute, im going to check if we have any callers. In the meantime, can i note that it doesnt appear that the minutes have been posted publicly and there was a recording of the meeting and so are we approving the recording or is there a written minute . I got a lot of questions from people about that. So the minutes are posted in september section. There is a link that says minutes to it. So they are posted. Im happy to send you the direct link if that would be helpful. No, i got it. I just wanted to make sure the public knew where to find these items. Its been a little confusing for folks, i think. A lot of times people dont think about going on the office of the controller website to find the documents. So, i think we need to keep making it clear to folks where to go for information about these meetings. Thank you. Thank you member friedenbach. Is there any public meant comment at this time. No Public Comments. So its been moved and seconded. All those who are in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed . Any on extension . All right, its been movedd ewe nam mousily. She is on the attendee list. Okay, ill go ahead sorry. Chair williams, we had a question to change the agenda item so marlo can join later. If you can take the items out of order, thats permissible. So i know we want the supervisors here to respond to questions, are we still in line with that timeline for if were moving abigail . I checked with her staff yesterday and it seemed fine. I have Marlo Simmons on the line. Okay, thank you. And were actually going to take item five. This is the background presentation on the plan and possible action by committee. So we have the interim director to present to us first. Is abigail here . Yes, can you hear me . So well move to your item if you want to begin your presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning chair, vice chair, members of this remarkable committee on this auspicious day. I didnt say much last time except for how much im excited to be here and echoing what i heard from the Public Comments and i look forward to being here in person as we continue to move through the pandemic. I have been asked by the committee to share background on h. S. A. s framework and brief update, very brief about how the strategic framework is playing through during this pandemic. So, chair with your permission, i will begin to share my slides. This is always the moment of truth on technology. Please just bare with me if i cant get this to work. Can somebody let me know they can see my slides . We cant see it. Give me one second. Try now. Okay, let me try again. How are we doing now . We can see them. Its in presenter mode. Im not sure if you need to go to full screen. Okay, thank you. So are you seeing apologies, we worked this out beforehand. Are you seeing the current slide and future slide . Yes. Thank you. I am currently seeing my full screen so give me a second to try to sort this out. Yes, we can see it now. The full screen . The presenter mode. Oh good. Everybody just wants to join my presentation today i think. Hang on, let me try this again. Im going to stop sharing and try again. Even with a dress rehearsal, im having challenges. How about now . Yes. Wonderful. Again, my name is Abigail Stewart kahn, the interim director. Thank you for inviting me here today. As i begin and throughout, if anyone knows me, i spend a lot of time on gratitude and i think thats important during a Global Pandemic to lift up the people, people experiencing homelessness whose voices we listen to as closely as we possibly can, all the way through all of our stakeholders to thank them both for their input, guidance, and collaborative work. I would like to thank the members and the board, and i know were joined by the homelessness coordinating board, our remarkable nonprofit partners, h. S. H. Staff and partners of the covid command center. So im delighted to share an update on the city and county of San Franciscos homelessness response system, knowing that i am simply the ambassador of this message. Im hoping the slide had advanced. Chair, i can see your face, so if you can continue to give me some visual queues, i would appreciate it. So the department of homelessness and supportive hou housing launched. We wanted to create a laser focused coordinated response on homelessness. San francisco has been very ahead and has a lot to be proud of thanks to many people on this committee on unique approaches to homelessness. The founders of the department felt that the city was behind on a coordinated and strategic approach. The department formed and formed its mission to make homelessness in San Francisco rare, brief, and one time. Im very happy to speak about what those terms mean. Theyre quite defined in our strategic framework and in National Best practice. For reference, i joined the department in august of 2017 as the director of Strategic Partnership to take the Community Input that had already been collected before my time and the National Best practice and to issue the five year strategic framework in october of 2017. So, thats just one milestone. You cant just write a plan. Since then and even during that time, we were hard at work. The homelessness response system is really the foundation of all of our work. We talked about six core components of the homelessness response system. I will say there is so much conversation appropriately about homelessness in San Francisco, so one thing we find very helpful is to focus on these six core components so we can locate and navigate all of the service rich environment and have people understand at least for the department where these pieces of work slot in. So we have outreach, the department and the department of Public Health, do a tremendous amount of outreach, some through Civil Servants and some through contractors. We do problem solving and pre y pretty prevention work, and we can get into what each of these mean. We launch coordinated entry, which is a National Best practice that had started up in San Francisco and moved more robustly with our partners in the last two years. We have shelter, housing, and the housing ladder. We will get more into the definitions of these, but i will always come back to these as the six core components of a strong homelessness response system. So as we go through, we have outreach around street homelessness. Most famous among these is the Homeless Outreach team. You see the pictures here. This is a combination of Public Service and Civil Service, as well as a nonprofit provider. They do work across the city. Their mission is to look for the most vulnerable among the Homeless Population but also to provide basic resources to everybody. So here you see a mask being handed out. We had to pivot back and forth, for example, between masks that are important for air quality and masks important for covid. This is a team thats constantly learning. They are responsible for bringing inside over half of the individuals who have come into the shelterinplace hotels just for some covid context and theyre not the only outreach guests in the field. We have other contracts that focus on young people and so on, so that we can be culturally responsive in our community. Several years ago, the department of Emergency Management and several partners formed the healthy streets Operation Center, which is currently under the department of Emergency Management. So our teams are part of it but not the whole part. And there is a lot of really good work that has been going up and down. I feel like were in a strong position with our partners now. Weve been focused during the pandemic to update our Prevention Strategies and allocate money that we already had available for homelessness preventi prevention. I would be happy to get into the details of that and that would be important for the committee to attend to. Im not trying to pass judgment about the importance, but for us, they focus on the moment of housing crisis so that we have a better understanding of focusing our resources of the homelessness response system to people who we have much more predictability will become homeless or are literally homeless if intervention does not occur. Im hoping im being clear there. All very critical parts of an infrastructure, but ours zbbegi at the moment of housing crisis. Homeward bound partners with the community to connect. Incredible stories here. There is also increasing training for all of our systems of care. Theyre training us and were training with them, on how we say to people, we dont want you to come into the homelessness response system. Even the best shelter is not where i want you to sleep. What does it look like to get safe tonight . Then somebody might say i can stay with my uncle if i was able to do x, y, or z. Some of this has adjusted significantly because of covid, so ideas like staying with your uncle has become more challenges and we know the resilience of people experiencing homelessness is profound. So we continue to lift up these prevention diversion strategies. Coordinated entry is our pathway to equity. We will need to go into a deeper dive on equity with this committee but i just want to focus why coordinated entry is important. It helps us to preserve scarce resources for people who are the most vulnerable among the population. Those in the hotels are the most vulnerable to covid and then we also have a population of people who are most vulnerable longterm homeless. And the Assessment Approach allows us to understand how to match which housing intervention or which treatment, not to make this some sort of a treatment based approach, not the sense of medical treatment, but the best interventi intervention. I used to say many on the committee are experts on this and helped us write this strategy. I wanted to make sure were laying the ground work. As for the patients and the people that are in fact experts in this and feel free to add comments as we wrap up according to the discretion of the chair. We have coordinated entry for use, coordinated entry for adults and for family. We do not yet have all of the data nor do we have the single unifying database available to fully drive this system and it could be interesting at some point in the future to learn how we are where we are accelerating our data work. We are fully launched and we are Just Launched. It was Just Launched when the pandemic hit. We are intending to use the pandemic to speed coordinated entry process and navigation to housing. Shelter is often the most talked about in our community, certainly the prop c legislation imagined some expansion and values the importance of shelter for safety. I will just add that we consider safe sleeping villages, for example, to be a form of shelter, although they dont have a roof over them or a lock on the front door. So during covid, they have been a very important response. We know from our unhoused neighbors that these kinds of outdoor safe places to be are something that is very valuable to them and we learned quite a lot from National Best practice and also from our own experimentation really during covid about what a successful safe approach and what is a more challenged one. Of course a little bit older in San Francisco, our navigation cent centers, we change our process during the winter and inclement weather and our traditional and temporary shelter. Its confusing based on the term because people are not on the lease so its not a permanent exit from homelessness. So its just relocating people and housing. We know housing is the solution to homelessness and we know more than ever during this pandemic that housing is healthcare. I want to lift up the providers and the h. S. A. Staff out there who work everyday to maintain peoples housing. We have eviction, we have a low eviction rate in our vast permanent Supportive Housing portfolio. And permanent Supportive Housing was begun by many of you here in San Francisco. Its something that we can be very proud of. We have permanent Supportive Housing and other Housing Solutions for every aspect of our system of care. One thing that is not as frequently discussed are mediumterm Housing Solutions. Some people call these things like rapid rehousing, which we can get into. We locate that again in our housing bucket. Another thing i want

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