 Good afternoon. Thank you Okay, we're gonna start early. So we're gonna be talking about bridge to housing and it would be unfair to start it by having it be about me because it really wasn't and to follow on the theme about being ready for innovation and Building on common themes It really takes pretty much a region to move a village. So I Can really only thank all of our partners and to say that I am actually also humbled to be able to present on their behalf Many of whom are much more eloquent than I so The issues surrounding homelessness are tough, right? standard ways haven't always proven to be a good solution for many and Encampments aren't a special issue and that's not just in Yolo. That's a national issue When the riverfront property in West Sacramento was sold to new owners They presented the city and its police department with the daunting task of trying to address the existing encampment The police chief turned to partners and challenged us. What else could we try besides traditional policing? If we can go back to the other slide So if you've gone out to the river before bridge to housing, this is what you would have seen a makeshift tent community trash no drinking water no sanitation And if you were lucky you would have met Steve. He's right up there in the top middle and He could have shown you around and he had been homeless for 17 years and the last eight of them He had spent on the riverbank now. He would tell you back in the day that he was never ever going to leave the riverbank again no matter what So what was our solution to this issue? Well, it was housing first and housing first is a different approach and it's a different approach to solving homelessness through Traditional permanent housing and Yolo's joined many other jurisdictions including the state of Utah and Houston and San Francisco Urban rural liberal and conservative in trying something new But in this we decided to create a time and population limited pilot So that we could test housing first But we could also use the lessons learned in creating new ways to address homelessness in our region But I have to tell you that to move an entire encampment of long-term homeless is a lot more than standard housing first It would take something bold. It would take something innovative And it would take a huge leap of faith by all of the partners and their respective political bodies But of course Yolo So what made it bold and innovative well There were many innovations and lots of them we're not going to go into today including the north levee cleanup and moving day Today we're just going to highlight three of them And the first one was being able to use housing vouchers to provide housing for encampment residents And to do that we were able to look at the entire universe of rules in a very complex program and create a brand new path Which had never existed before that would allow us to work with encampment residents the second thing we did was to Address an entire encampment. This is the first time that we know of Where an entire encampment has been moved and when we did that we didn't cherry pick the easy to house We didn't cherry pick those with services instead. We rolled enrolled everyone who signed up and Unlike most programs as you can see we took their dogs and their cats And the third part is we created boot camp for housing now They average length of homelessness on the river was over four years and some had been on the river for over 20 So they are the most difficult to serve. They don't have income. They don't have identification They have suffered major trauma in their lives Many have substance abuse issues and boot camp which you can see right here Gave them an opportunity to work on social reintegration and harm reduction And they got to relearn what you and I take for granted every day Stay inside Change your sheets and towels Use a cell phone Work with a property manager and not just a social worker And so What did we get for outcomes? And so if you can see this is our bridge to housing 71 Surveys 65 entered the program 53 graduated Of that 23 had no health or substance abuse issue and everybody else did 49 of them were co-occurring 75 of them were between the ages of 25 and 54 and there was a pretty good gender split between male and female And oh, yeah all those pets So what do we get at the very end? You can see in the second chart cal fresh pre-enrollment was 47 percent 81 percent post Health insurance was 47 percent pre to 89 percent post and the income of whopping 11 percent of those folks had income And 40 percent at this point have it now But most telling zero percent had any kind of housing opportunity or vouchers opposed to 92 percent post program And as the time of this 47 percent of them are now permanently housed and I understand as of today that two more have found housing and that's it Thank you so much These outcomes are uncommon if you don't track this kind of challenge I think that this project is is and will attract national attention And it's something that that is Possibly a breakthrough