We urge you to watch the recording of the entire Homeless Collaborative (CoC) Board meeting, but we wanted to emphasize one more important highlight, that came out of two separate presentations, led by Tammy McGhee, of Clutch Consulting and Dr. David Woody, III, Homeless Collaborative General Assembly Executive Council Chair.
The board not only endorsed the use of a Coordinated Access System, as it is required to do by the Federal Government, but to prioritize veterans within its Coordinated Access System (CAS), as the Federal Government further recommends.
Coordinated Access, sometimes called Coordinated Assessment or Coordinated Entry, is a community-wide process developed to ensure all people experiencing a housing crisis have fair and equal access and are quickly identified, assessed for, referred, and connected to housing and assistance based on their strengths and needs.
Prioritization is the key word. No community has unlimited resources, and every community must make decisions how to prioritize its resources. Since more resources are available to veterans, many communities prioritize veterans in their CAS. It is important to emphasize that this does not mean that our system will prioritize a veteran with lesser needs and lower vulnerability over a non-veteran with greater needs and higher vulnerability. However, all things being equal, veterans will be prioritized over non-veterans with the same level of need and vulnerability.
Prioritizing veterans helps non-veterans too, since communities which are deliberate and thoughtful with their CAS, continuously refine and improve it with every individual placement. Just as important, ending veteran homelessness provides proof of concept that ending homelessness, in general, is eminently doable.
Though homelessness in its present form is a relatively new historical phenomenon, homelessness is sometimes viewed by the public as something akin to the weather. You can complain, but there is nothing you can really do about it.
Ending veteran homelessness shows that nothing can be further from the truth. 82 communities and 3 states have already ended veteran homelessness, and we will join their ranks before the end of the year. By reaching this milestone, we will demonstrate that ending all other types of homelessness in Dallas and Collin Counties is no pipe dream.
