 The theme for the majority of tonight's town hall is gonna be focused on homelessness and the housing crisis in Athens. But before that, I did want to cover a few things that we had kind of discussed in the last meeting, some updates from those, and also wanted to provide an opportunity for Jackie to welcome everybody here. So before Jackie comes up, just a few housekeeping things. There's bathrooms down the hall. You can go out either door and get to those bathrooms right on the other side of this wall basically. There's also a water fountain out there. Please remember to silence your devices. If you got them, I just did mine. I had forgotten actually. And if you're getting real excited and want to talk to the person next year or you have a call, please step out to do that. We don't have any microphones in this room, so it's gonna be really hard to, speaking of the devil. You're gonna be really hard to hear each other if we're kind of competing over side conversations. So with that in mind, Jackie, would you like to introduce yourself? So welcome everyone to the Athens-Clarke County Cooperative Extension Office. I'm Jackie Dallas, I'm the County Extension Coordinator. And for those of you who are not familiar with Cooperative Extension, we are the service and outreach component of the university. We are independent of everybody on campus. We are here in this office to serve the citizens of Athens-Clarke County. So we have agents in all three programming areas, Ag and National Resources for HN Family Consumer Sciences. Our building was the second to last construction project from the 2011 splost funded budget. And fire station number two in our building were built at the same time. Our ribbon cutting was in September of 2019. And then of course, like everyone else, we had to take a brief hiatus from public service in a face-to-face manner. But we've been up and running again since last year. If you have the opportunity, one of the big advantages of being here as opposed to where we were on West Broad is that we have a 10,000 square foot demonstration garden that is completely volunteer led. A third of the garden is fruits and vegetables that is rotated on a brisk schedule. And the rest of the garden is ornamentals, and special seedings or special plants. We also have two beehives. We are a location site for the pollinator census. And this past April, we were on the garden tour for the first time. We were one of the garden selected to be on the tour. If you need your soil or water tested from your home, we can do that here. We're one of five food scrap locations in the county. So if you have food scraps and you don't want compost at your house, you can do that here. We also try to collaborate with the county whenever possible. So we are one of the early voting locations. Beginning October 29th, you'll be able to come out here and do early voting. And October 29th is a Saturday. We also offer low income nutrition education to SNAP eligible audiences. We work with several agencies in the county. So if you are interested in having that collaboration with us, let me know. And then for any of you all who either have children in the Athens Park County school system or in any of the other private or peripheral schools or you have been through the Park County school system, you know that our 4-H program is introduced in the fifth grade and we have a very active and vibrant 4-H program, including state officers and district officers. So that's what we do in a nutshell. I guess if you don't take anything else away tonight, please know that although we are in the same county as the university, the university has a separate mission and process. Our mission for this office and in this building is to serve the citizens of Athens Park County. The decisions we make about the programming we offer and how to serve is based on needs assessment that's done at the county level. So if there is an opportunity that you know of that we could collaborate with you, please reach out and we're more than happy to have that conversation. And if we can be of service in any way, please let us know as well. We're open 8th, 12 and one to five. My admin Judy goes to lunch from 12 to one. So, and it's hard for me to make her go to lunch. So I make her, I try very hard to make sure she gets her hour every day. But other than that, you can always reach us and leave a voicemail. So, but thank you all for coming tonight. It's a pleasure to see the room full. We love having happy faces in this room. And thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. Anybody have any questions for Jackie before she concludes her evening with us? There has to be one question. Sure. Do you happen to have a food collection service here since there are bus stops around here and to give away food like for Thanksgiving and things like that? We do collaborate with the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia. We are not a year round collection site, but we have done the collections around the holidays. But I mean, that's something that we could certainly have a conversation about. It was convenient for people. We will have someone coming out from the food bank. They have a new person who's going to be doing more snap outreach to try to increase the number of people applying for snap programs and win programs. So that could be something we incorporate, but they're going to have some regular time when they're available out here to work with clients on this part, in this part of town. So, if anybody brings some food that is still as good as a spotter, whatever, we could bring it here. I would like to circle back with you on that because I need to, we're a small staff. And so I really don't want to over commit before I know what that would look like. The other thing that we have pledged in the past is diapers. I don't know if y'all are familiar with the Assins Diaper Bank, but unfortunately diapers are one thing that low income families do not get assistance toward. Neither SNAP nor WIC has any kind of program that supports diapers. And diapers are the number one impediment to low income families using childcare because you must supply your own diapers. So that's something that is a huge need. And the Assins Diaper Bank will accept broken packs of diapers, meaning that if you've outgrown a certain size, they re-bundle everything and distribute those. So if you know of anyone who's got extra diapers, we'll happily take extra diapers. And I think that you're going to have to start that. Because otherwise you'd be very uncomfortable. All right, we'll give it up for Jackie Dallas. How about? So just a couple other notes and then we'll kind of get into our agenda here. If you didn't already sign in, please see my wonderful partner, Megan, over there who's helping out tonight. And thank you, Megan, for helping. There's also a whole bunch of handouts. So there's, at the very least, everyone should please have an agenda and the kind of detailed supplement. There's also a survey that I strongly encourage you to consider filling out. Even if you're one of the people who's helping present, I really would love the feedback on what you think we could do to make these better in the future. And also what topics you'd like to see us focus on in the future. So at the very least, if you could consider filling out those portions of the survey. And I also wanted to talk about how the Q and A is going to work tonight. So we have a lot of people presenting a lot of very dense information. And what I would ask is for you to use the kind of papers and pens you have to note any questions that come up for you or ideas that come up for you that are kind of deeper questions or bigger picture ideas. During the presentations, if you have a quick clarifying question like, oh, I didn't hear you or what does that acronym stand for? By all means, cut in with that. But anything else, please save it for the end. Once we get through everyone's presentations then we'll get into a dialogue. And my goal for that dialogue tonight is for us to really have a conversation together. There's a lot of limits to what I can really answer. Not only are there limits to what I can hold on my head there's just limits to what I knew about even if I spent all of my time focusing on this. We happen to have some folks in the room tonight who are what I would consider experts in the field of housing and homelessness who have offered themselves not only for the presentation but to stick around and be a part of that dialogue. And so I do hope that we can make that dialogue as rich as possible. Part of that means listening to each other and talking to each other in a respectful manner. So in addition to the keeping side conversations outside I also ask that everybody try to approach this conversation tonight with curiosity and empathy. I think that we'll go a lot farther if we remember that we don't all know everything that includes me and also that everyone in my belief maybe not everyone but the vast majority of people in the world are really trying their best to make their lives, the lives of those around them their communities better. And a lot of what we struggle is to find a way to do that effectively. And so I just asked that we try to root ourselves in that curiosity and that empathy tonight. So before we get into the meaty main topic I wanted to just briefly go over some of what's on this detailed handout. So a quick update on the Fowler Mill Bridge. Anybody who's been on my social media lately knows there's at least one person with a fake account who can't stop talking about this. But the truth is there's a lot of people who are inconvenienced by this having been closed for so long. Thankfully we voted on a contract since the last town hall with GDOT that is moving forward. The bridge with an interim repair should be open in January or February barring any kind of big weather disaster or something in the area, which is great. That repair will be what's called an interim repair which is basically we're repairing what's there to make it work for vehicles to go over for a short amount of time but a full replacement of the bridge is gonna happen and that's gonna cost millions of dollars and that's spent a lot of what's held this up is partnering with GDOT to get us to this point. GDOT's now gonna cover 80% of the cost. The only way that GDOT would cover 80% of those millions of dollars saving us the ability of using those monies for other things perhaps including some of the stuff we're talking about tonight is if we went through their process and their process has been a long one. So that's the kind of very short answer of why it's taken the time it has. Happy to talk about that in more detail after if y'all would like. Also wanted to highlight just some key election date information. The deadline to register in time for this election has already passed. The advance voting has begun and as Genki mentioned, this is one of the locations you can vote early. So if you or anyone you know wants to vote, the schedule for this particular location is on your detailed supplement as well as the weekend times for the downtown location. So we have some Sunday voting happening as well. If you go over to the back side, I'll avoid kind of talking through it for the sake of time and for the sake of maintaining everyone's interest hopefully. But if anyone does have questions about the T-splost or ARPA updates that are contained on the back of this, I know we got into those in a lot more detail at the August town hall. Happy to talk about those. And finally, I wanted to mention to everybody, it's actually not on your handout, a couple of notable housing updates. People are asking me about the mall all the time. I'm asking myself about the mall all the time. I'm asking the people who are involved more directly in the mall about the mall fairly frequently. And last I've heard they're planning to get their plans submitted to the planning department. If that didn't happen today then definitely by the end of the month, that'll be a revised, probably significantly revised plan from what we saw submitted for consideration by the planning commission earlier this year. There should be more green space included. The grid layout of the roads should connect a little better. And beyond that, I don't really know what to tell you in terms of the details of it because I don't get that information really earlier than anyone else. But they have committed to having another town hall once they've submitted. So my hope is that there will be a town hall in November. The date you see noted on the calendar, which is on the back of your agendas is the date that I think we'll be having that on but I don't know for sure. So keep your ears peeled for that. I'll be posting on social media. I'll be sending out an email. I'll be texting folks, et cetera. And then there's also a development going in at Melwood Drive and Mill Center Boulevard by a show of hands, who knows where that is? Okay, so for the rest of you all, it's basically off Jennings Mill Parkway kind of across from the mall. So if you went down Atlanta Highway and then took a left shortly after the mall and then took a right on Jennings Mill Parkway, you'd be kind of fronting what will be a pretty significant development. So that's on our agenda for a vote this coming meeting November 1st and I've put together a commission defined option that's gonna take that, what I would call imperfect development and make it what I think is a bit better. Importantly, it's gonna bring a lot more housing units to this community and ones that are of a smaller size and will hopefully be ideally at least a bit more affordable than most of the new construction we see. So before I get into my quick spiel about homelessness and housing and then introduce our first presenter, does anyone have any questions for me about those topics that I just covered? It's okay to have questions and it's okay to not have questions. All right, well, when we get into the dialogue later if a question does come up, happy to talk about it then. And also there's some time blocked out for kind of breaking up the room and sort of informally still being here which is a chance for you to get whatever materials you find yourself interested in or talk with me more in depth about those later. So I made some notes for myself to try to get through this effectively. You know, the handout I gave kind of notes some what I would call significant decisions the mayor and commission has made in relation to housing and homelessness here in Athens. Can like almost get it to fit entirely on there. It, I began this timeline basically when I got on the commission because that's when I have a more intimate understanding of things. And so that was at the very end of 2020 and working with a number of folks especially folks who are involved in the homeless coalition at the time and some colleagues on the commission. We got this resolution passed which for me has been a thing I keep referring back to. So what are we doing to kind of follow through on the commitments outlined in that resolution? So I won't go through all the details of that right now except in so far as people might have questions but there are copies of it on the table and I'm very happy to talk about that in detail later. I feel in a lot of ways proud that that resolution mapped out some pretty experimental and innovative ideas but also mapped out some goalposts for a strategic plan and we've really seen the commission and the county government take what I would call an increased focus on these issues in recent years. Is that thanks to that resolution or thanks to me getting on the commission? No, people have been working on this for years before I ever was but I do think that played a part in it and it's been cool to see the work that's been done since aligned with what was mapped out in that resolution. So my quick spiel and am I on time here? I think I told myself, yeah, 625, okay. My quick spiel, the local government, we're really limited in a lot of ways because we're operating under not only the state and federal government but also just the realities of human limits and global markets and life under capitalism and yada, yada, yada. But where we do have quite a bit of influence is around what I would call three arenas, land, policy and funding. I'll say funding with an asterisk. The land of Athens-Clarke County, by and large, there's a lot of decision-making power the local government has around how that land is used, especially the land the county owns. An example that you may be familiar with is the encampment project happening on county-owned land. Other examples you may be familiar with is all the other county-owned land where people may or may not be staying on a given night but it's illegal for them to be there. Until that encampment was established, there was nowhere someone who is suffering one of the most extreme forms of poverty, homelessness, could legally be. You're either illegally on private property or illegally on public property until that encampment. We've also seen, because we wanted that encampment to be a safe place for people to be and have access to resources where people can hopefully get out of that situation, that that encampment filled up within a week and has stayed full the whole time and there's still hundreds more people who don't have anywhere to legally be. And so we're stuck in this kind of mess of a situation. So then we get into the policy question. What can the local government do around policy? And there's, I think a lot more that we probably could do, but a big question mark around what we should do. And I'm hoping that tonight's conversation will help inform my thinking on that a bit. But really we need a lot more communication in the community, ideally rooted in that curiosity and empathy, in my view, to get us to a place where we're making better policy decisions that will then inform the funding. Most of the funding the county government has ever put towards these issues, what we could call social issues, I guess. has been federal money. And that federal money comes with some pretty strict regulations and rules. And those regulations and rules are not always the same. They change year to year. They change depending on the type of funding. And that can be very confusing for smaller entities to engage with. That can be very confusing for individuals to understand. It'd be very confusing for commissioners to understand. You've probably seen us be confused on camera about it. And so when we're talking about funding, I think it's important to recognize that most of the money that the county government is in charge of facilitating the use of is actually not money that we get to decide the parameters for the use of. ARPA has been a particularly great example of a flexible bucket of money. It's a bucket of money that's given us just a lot more options than other monies have. And I'm grateful that we've got about $5 million in ARPA money, still designated for tackling this topic. But the truth is, anyone who's spent any time digging into this at all knows that $5 million sounds like a lot to probably any individual in this room, but it's only gonna make maybe a dent in this problem if we use it well. And so my hope is that we can think about how to go about the strategic plan and that $5 million in as optimal a way as possible to truly do something transformative that changes the paradigm that we've been taking for granted for years, which is that there are hundreds if not thousands of people in a given year who literally don't have anywhere to stay. And more and more people feel the squeeze and feel the fear of eviction while the cost of housing goes up but the wages in the community don't. So with all that said, there's one last thing I wanna emphasize. I'm sorry, I went a little bit over my own time, I think, which is, and I don't know who else and the presenters might mention this, but there is this much need in Athens around housing. There is this much complication and need people facing homelessness. And there are about this many resources. And I think with ARPA, with some other federal funding that we're seeing, a lot of us putting our heads together with greater collaboration, we might be able to turn this into this, but being realistic, y'all, as far as I can tell, there's still a gap between where we can be in the next year or two and where we need to be. And so hopefully we make thoughtful decisions around how to get from here to as close to here as possible. But I just wanna kinda root this conversation and an acknowledgement that a lot of what we're up against isn't people just screwing around and not trying to use the resources available to them well. It's people scrambling and working overtime and dealing with workforce shortages and continuing to work through COVID and continuing to engage in some of the messiest, most dangerous situations, day in and day out with very limited resources and support. Often with a lot of confusion and still, despite all that, despite the growth we've seen around collaboration in recent years with the coalition, with different partners coming together, despite the county trying to step up and do a bit more, we're still only here and we need to be here. And I hope that tonight's conversation will help us think about how we can work together to grow that instead of tear each other down because we're facing the bleak reality that the problem is just bigger than a lot of the tools we have or at least bigger than our understanding of how to wield those tools effectively. So at that in mind, I would like to introduce our first presenters. They're from the Clark County government, specifically the Housing and Community Development Department, Andrew Saunders and Melinda Lorde. The slideshow, do you wanna do the slideshow for me? Sure. Or do you wanna do the slideshow for me? Um... So I'm Andrew Saunders, I'm the Interim Director of Housing and Community Development. This is my partner. Melinda Lorde, I'm the Assistant Director of Housing and Community Development Department. So I've been on the job, this job for about six months but I have been in Athens for about 17 years and I've been with the unified government. So in the context of it, I've seen a lot of things and I certainly have appreciated learning more about homelessness. Today, I'm gonna take you a little bit through what HCD does. Melinda will talk a little bit about homelessness and housing opportunity in the county and then I'll close you out with next steps. Next slide, please. So a little bit about HCD. First of all, before we get to this slide, so we have several areas of emphasis. We work on affordable housing, we work on supporting homelessness issues in the community and then through our CDBG funds, we might have some workforce development and some youth development opportunities that exist and every now and then we throw in an infrastructure project for fun. Homelessness, as you might imagine, is a pretty big part of our work. Right now, we've seen across the nation and in some cases across the world that affordable housing and homelessness are key issues that are facing our societies. And so we have a kind of overarching role in HCD as it relates to homelessness. First and foremost, we're the keeper of the checkbook. So the federal government bestows money onto us in several different forms that we use to address homelessness. But before we go and deploy that money, we do a little bit of assessment and we make sure that there's coordination happening. So we do, we help to coordinate, point-to-time count with a lot of our partners in the housing inventory count, their kind of sister assessments. And then through our homeless specialist, we help to work with the database management of what's happening with homeless services and individuals in the community, training on that. We help to support the work of the homeless coalition and hear more about that later. And then we're the lead applicant on a grant called the Continuum of Care, which is a main driver of homeless housing in our community. And on the far side, we'll see different types of funding that is available. Next slide, please. So the point-and-time count, we actually have copies of the point-and-time count in the housing inventory count in the back. If I could tell you any one thing to remember tonight, it is an assessment, it is not a census. So every year across the nation, same date, more or less? Same week. Right. Communities go out and they look and they document what is the condition of unsheltered individuals. And so that's a lot of work from our partners with the homeless coalition and volunteers and we deploy iPads like it's going out of style. And we try to capture things like how long have they been homeless? What conditions might they suffer from? What are their barriers to gaining housing? What are their barriers to gaining employment? Things of that nature. It is very useful looking at trends. So if you wanted to see how is the population changing over time? Is it increasing? Is it decreasing? Are there problems emerging? Great. If you want to say, well, how is Athens comparing to Atlanta? Pretty good. That's how, it's useful in that. It is a terrible tool to say there are 247 homeless people in Athens. The answer is nobody can really tell you the census. We have some glimpses in time and I can assure you the point-and-time count is the lowest and most inaccurate one. But that doesn't take away from its value. So let's move into it a little bit. Here you'll see the overall summary of sheltered and unsheltered individuals between 2018 and 2022. I'll put a little bit of an asterisk by 2021. So technically a point-and-time count didn't have to happen right here. Had to do with COVID, if I recall correctly. However, we had some volunteers step up that were willing to lead that. They did it outside of the usual time, unusual practices, but anyhow, you can see the overall homelessness is increasing and there is a temporary, I'll describe, its surge in the sheltered population and we'll get into that in a minute. Next slide. So what kinds of things do we find in the point-and-time count? Homelessness as you've probably seen by talking with your friends and what you might observe in the community is increasing significantly. Most likely its highest point in the recent history. It is most likely to impact individuals of color and this is especially true in families. So when we look at family homelessness, an adult and a child, that is most likely to occur in families of color. And then what I find really interesting is how long have you been homeless and why are you here? Those are two questions that come out. What we find is well over half of respondents have been here more than two years so they're what we would call chronically homeless. Also why are they here? More or less the same reasons all of us are here. They came here for a job, for housing because they have family here, maybe even for education. And whatever series of coincidences and life circumstances have come together to put them in that situation and now they're struggling when we get into that happens just as we struggle with our own problems. Next slide. So at this point I'm going to pass it to the more knowledgeable part of the team who takes these other aspects. So I've been with AHCD for almost seven years prior that I was working with direct homeless service provision for over 13. So this was where I cut my P in my career. Athens Park County specifically has homeless assistance programs that run from the beginning street outreach activities which is where we try to identify, find out what needs are there and attempt to connect them to mainstream services through those supportive services into shelter, transitional housing rather than rehousing and permanent supportive housing activities. Next slide please. So we do an annual housing inventory HIC account and what that does is attempt to give a snapshot of the homeless housing available through our agency providers within the county on that given night. And then it also tablets those numbers of beds and units on that designated count night. That, it's similar enough to the PIC account in that we are solely dependent upon our agency providers to give us accurate data on the housing that they have available and that it's in our HMIS system correctly so that we can then analyze that data. Next slide please. Can you just real quick tell everybody what HMIS is? Homeless Management Information System. So HUD created the HMIS system for any agency receiving COC into UMF Care grant funding which is competitive. If they're receiving the ESG grant which is emergency solutions grant which is competitive. Those two funding federal funding sources require that agencies getting that money enter client information into that system. And the point of that system is to be able to track from start to finish what services a homeless person is receiving. So we can identify gaps, we can identify. It helps us to figure out who may need certain types of housing such as AVHS provides housing for people with mental health disorders. So they require specific type of services compared to a family that has just been evicted and needs maybe they just need to be placed in another affordable house. So this HMIS system helps us keep track of what's being done, what housing services what supportive services are being provided and it also helps us capture those that are going back through the system repetitively to really try to figure out what we can do to help them not continue to repeat the cycle. Shay, do you have a clarifying question? Yeah, well I wanted to add something really quick. You had mentioned that it depends on accurate information which is so true. We don't get paid. Agencies who receive grants don't get paid if we have more than a 5% error margin which equates to about one little detail about one single person missing. It might be a birth date that's missing. So the error for margin is really low. It is. They get graded. Yes. They don't get our money unless we have it inaccurately. Yeah, thank you, Shay. And also for those of you all who don't know, Shay Post is the executive director of the Athens Area Homes Shelter. So thanks a lot for taking time. Sorry. You can be here too. And this is similar to the pit count. This is a chart showing the housing number for a count between 2018 and 2022. And as you can see, the emergency shelter beds increased. But our trends are actually, the trend is that with the exception of permanence for housing, the numbers pretty much went up as far as housing or units were available for homeless. Next slide. And what we take away from that is that there was a decrease in that permanent supportive housing and that that capacity has been trending down since 2018. There's been a significant increase in rapidity housing that kind of has something to do with HUD. HUD kind of targets the activities they want their funding to focus on. And rapidity housing jumped up in their priority list. It took over of transitional housing. And it seems to be impacting our permanent supportive housing to a degree. Then we did have the highest emergency shelter capacity. A lot of that had to do with CARES funding that came in through the county that was dedicated to increasing that shelter capacity, whether it be through emergency shelter vouchers in a hotel or whether it be that maybe a temporary expansion occurred. And then there, but there's always, always, always limited availability of shelter and housing. Our agencies do their best to find affordable housing and to provide that to all of our homeless citizens. But there's only so much money and there's only so much available housing. Please, I'm sorry. And yeah, I'm sorry. Okay, so our CBBG-CV program. So this is our CARES funding. So this is temporary. It's not gonna last forever. And this is the final round of money that we've received from HUD that is currently going through the system right now. So you see we have five agencies and they're providing numerous activities and assistance. And we have a couple of projects that are prioritizing serving households that are at risk or that are pending maybe eviction. That's called homeless prevention activities. And the focus, we've had some crazy stuff going on in the county lately with some private developers coming through, swiping out is what little bit of affordable housing we have and evicting massive numbers of people. So we're trying to prevent that as long as we can with some of this money. So we've got that focus. But there is still rapid rehousing and there is some substance use and financial assistance activities going on as well. Is Family Promise still among those who's doing that expanded scope too? Yes. Okay, yeah. We missed this. Sorry, they should probably start an asterisk beside me. I want to clarify that. Yes, sorry about that. Okay, and emergency shelter. Two, three, four, five, six. We currently have six active shelters running, we would normally have eight. I'm sure everybody read in the newspaper where Salvation Army has stopped all assistance, including their men's or women's emergency shelter. So where we saw in that hit count, the numbers went up for emergency shelter. Probably going to see unless they get running by January of next year, we're going to see a significant decrease because that's 36 and 36 beds lost right now. Is that due to remodeling? Is that what y'all have got? It's several issues that Salvation Army announced. So they've had new leadership come in and I would say it's a remodel and a retool. So they're looking at staff training, they're looking at services, they're looking at the financial health of the overall program and then of course the quality of facilities. And then we have rapid rehousing. And just to get an understanding of what rapid rehousing means, it's the client that's seeking assistance can get deposit and rent assistance depending upon how long the program operates. You can have short-term up to three months rent assistance, rent and utility, six months or longer, up to 12 months assistance. But the lease is in the tenant's name and there is a rent restriction. So the rent and the utility cannot fall outside of a specific number that HUD designates annually. And it's never close to what the rents are in our area. So we have some things that we can work with in that respect but it's still difficult to find. But we have seen a pretty good service provision in rapid rehousing, getting people placed into their own housing and then assisting them to stabilize. And then transitional housing. Primarily we have two or three agencies that are running transitional housing. That's up to 24 months assistance. The lease is typically in the agency name. So the person comes in, receives the services that they need to get two self-stabilization and self-sufficiency. And hopefully within that 24 months they're ready to transition into their own permanent housing. And then we have permanent supportive housing and. Sure. Could you clarify what SDMI means? Severe and persistent. Thank you. Even the acronyms catch me in time so I have to stop the thing. Okay. Great clarifying. And then we have permanent supportive housing which as long as there's compliance with the program rules and as long as that money lasts to support that housing that person could possibly live there for the rest of their lives. That's what it means, permanent supportive housing and it's supportive because services are attached to it. So we don't just stick people in a house and walk away. They're receiving constant case management assistance. They're probably being assisted with mainstream services as well. Andrew. So that's one real quick because this one always stands out to me. So that bottom row, VA Vash. So there are currently 110 individuals in this community that are former, have former service with the military that have a need for ongoing housing support and services. And I've met one of these individuals recently because they've actually been caught up in the whole investor owns, changing the way things rent kerfluffle that is so disruptive in our community. And so that just always stands out to me that there's at least 110 people in our community that have served our country and they need help too. So it's not always just that person you see standing on the corner, sometimes it's somebody counts serving, sometimes it's families that maybe are subject to domestic violence or other issues. And to each case, there is a series of tools that can be applied to help them. Well, I'll just add one statement to that. In most communities over 50% of the homeless that are being counted are children below 18. Or what? Children below the age of 18. Okay, so this is a summary of funding that's been deployed in support of homelessness since the start of the pandemic. And you can see that we are knocking on the door of $10 million, which is astounding. There's always been a significant amount of funding, some of this like continuum of care is reoccurring and then a good bit of this like CDBGVCV and some of the CARES Act were one time funding. But when you were facing a pandemic with work stoppages and housing issues, there was a need to really just kind of tackle this at all fronts and so that's certainly what's happened. Nice slide, please. However, there's approximately $8 million of additional funding in the pipeline to address this issue. So when Commissioner Hul was talking about the scale of the problems and the tools that may be there, you can see some of that summarized here. Next slide. There've been a few places where funding has been deployed through ARPA, most notably the sanctioned encampment and the eviction prevention program. Happy to talk about this after this with anybody who really wants to take that deep dive. There have been some success stories in there. So one thing that I really want to point out, sanctioned encampment has its warts, right? You've read about them in the papers. It has done a really good job of putting people into that next step of housing. Part of that is because the partners at Advantage can go and access the same people predictably at the right location. Whereas if they're unhoused, sometimes that burden is on those people to come to Advantage and they might miss a bus or they might have an issue, might be sick. So that has been one area where I personally have been impressed with overall performance. And then of course, the health strategic plan. So next slide. When you have about $8 million of funding left, we wanna make sure that it's deployed in a way that makes sense that does the most good. So is it an expansion of emergency shelter facilities? Is it a creation of permanent supportive housing? Is it the deployment of more street outreach? Is it some combination of all the above? The answer is we don't entirely know until we engage with individuals experiencing homelessness, community members to understand what need is, businesses and other stakeholders and of course service providers. And so what we're embarking on now is a strategic plan that should be presented back to the commission. I believe this one's projected to be in August is what our last run was. That will help to prioritize how are these different funding streams used and then what are the other changes? What are the policy changes? How might we be able to support the homeless coalition and their work? What are ways that we can tap foundational support and other measures to more effectively help people in our community? One quick note about that too. There will be like community input sessions built into this process. So please like keep your ear to the ground when you see the government announcing and you see me posting and announcing about these things. That's a chance to make sure that your input, what you learned tonight, what you think about needs to happen is incorporated in this plan. And at this point, I think we're going to go well over our 10 minutes. So I appreciate your grace. Any clarifying questions? I believe meeting questions are helping the end. Thanks a lot. And John Morris and John Berger here. I'm not sure who among the crew is coming up. But if y'all want to come up and speak to you, what advantage is up to? Yes. We are going to do our best to race through this and ignore all potential questions. So my name is Evan Mills. I'm the Director of Housing and Development for Advantage Vibals. So for those of you who don't know, how many know Advantage Vibal Health? Okay, that's ironically, that's more hands that were raised in the last time, I ask that question, which has been embarrassing. Advantage Vibal Health says, we are the local community service board. What that means is that we are the safety net provider for this region. We're based in Athens. We cover the 10 county region in Northeast Georgia. We see between 10 and 11,000 individuals a year. Now, when I say safety net provider, with that, we work with individuals with a severe and persistent mental illness, substance use disorder and developmental disabilities. And again, safety net provider. So people immediately think, oh, well we provide mental health services. That is an inaccurate way to look at Advantage. The way that I ask each of you to think of Advantage is a provider of services to individuals with mental illness, substance abuse, or developmental disabilities. That there's a very important distinction there. We are a provider of services. Those services include evidence-based, addiction-based support, mental health counseling, housing support, homeless outreach, skill-building, transportation, childcare, all of these things that it comes. Because the individuals that come to us as the safety net provider, come to us with a severe and persistent mental illness, but also a lot of other barriers that we get to as the safety net provider address with them. So with that, I'm gonna go to the next slide. With that, that comprehensive approach that we've tried to take and meet individuals where they are, we've developed over the years. I think Advantage first got into the housing services game for like a better time back in 2003 with the advent of permanent support in housing. Since then, we've tried our best to develop sort of a comprehensive continuum of housing approach. Next slide. So just to give you guys an idea, based on the kind of the level of funding and everything, recently, we've been able to house over 500 individuals, households throughout the past year and currently actively housing over 300 households and individuals. And that is through a variety of different housing programs. We've got short-term, medium-term, long-term housing supports. Some of those are scattered site. We lease directly with the property managers and owners and so the lease is in our name. In other situations, the lease is in the individual's name or the household's name and we provide financial assistance through a lot of the different funding mechanisms that HCD Andrew and Melinda discussed earlier. We also have, and those are kind of set up in long-term permanent supportive housing type ways, but also we've got shorter term. We have onsite staff housed within certain property properties or apartment complexes, where we do provide a level of 24-7 oversight. Those are relatively few compared to the overall housing scope that we provide. So here's the next slide. On that, and I know I skip past it and mean to, but the last section there indicated 73%. You see that 73% successful. That's across all of our programs. And what I'm defining, what we are defining as successful discharge is once our assistance ends, they maintain their housing properties or they are maintaining a level of stability within our existing permanent supportive housing properties. So that's a, I don't know if you go, what is that, a C? A C grade in high school, something like that. So we're looking at, on average, 20 to 25 to 30% of our folks do not do much in their housing programs as the day goes by. So you can go to the next slide. So in this, and this is kind of what I was talking about before, the scope and the continuum of what we have tried to provide. And I've asked John and John to come up here and talk a little bit about what they do specifically to the homeless outreach and housing support programs. But just as a general overview, our housing pool and everything that we do do, we've got the street outreach engagement to the Bay Jotland Center short-term, sitting in within a community term to longer-term programs. And that's been good and bad, to a extent. I'll go into that in a little bit down the road as far as the good news is that, oh my gosh, we're able to provide housing for 544 households over the past year. The bad news is only correct to provide housing for 544 households over the past year. And as Jesse mentioned, we're still not meeting the need. We've got 30 to 60 individuals come through the Homestay Service Center on a daily basis. These are separate individuals. We've got planning lists. We call it planning lists, waiting lists of people trying to get into the hotel program, trying to wait and get into the permanent school housing program, our crisis-restricted programs, the record-reason programs. We were working with, I think, somewhere between 40 and 60, I have the numbers in front of me, but that number sounds based on the internal spreads we have that are actively searching for housing that we have determined is eligible for our record-reason program, but we haven't found housing for them yet. And just to kind of give you an idea of the scope of the need, we can yay celebrate, we provided housing for 544, but it's not really embarrassing that we had to provide housing for 544 individuals. I also would like for you guys before I hand it off to the Johns. Our scope and our population are those with severe and persistent mental illness. And so there's a huge need and a reason why we're looking at that 27 to 30% of individuals that aren't being successful. Those individuals are not doing well in the existing housing programs that we have right now, being the rapid rehousing, the shelter plus care, the independent-style living situations that we receive federal vouchers for, they're not doing very well because they're, they've got severe and persistent mental illness. They've got active addiction. They've got a lot of things that are not doing, they're not coping well given the independent-style living situation. So yeah, I'll talk a little bit about what we discovered in the existing housing market is, what do we do with those individuals? They're coming in and out of the jails, in and out of the hospitals, being the most visible in the downtown areas, in some cases, maybe even the exodus. And in those kind of spaces, what can we or how can we deal with that? So I'll talk about that a little bit later. But first, I want to introduce John Birch, who is one of my program managers that's over our housing and homeless support rooms. So as I said, I'm one of the program managers under the Thrive Services at Advantage. So I managed the Homeless State Service Center, which the staff in that department run the rapid rehousing program, the prevention program. Rapid rehousing, again, is an assistance program that helps people from six to nine months. We can even go up to 12 in certain situations, get into, get from homelessness to Staley House, and then we hopefully keep them there after our assistance is done. It was just with rent and utilities there. And then prevention helps people stay in their apartments if they're facing eviction or they're behind on their rent. Some of those two programs, the Shelter Plus Care, are a permanent supportive housing program, which people have to have a severe and persistent mental illness to get into, be active with Advantage, to set them up with psychiatric services, counseling, and case management. And they can stay in that program for their lifetime, as long as they follow the rules and are keeping their appointments. Then I'm also a manager, John, who manages our street outreach program and our hotel voucher program as well. I just wanna highlight one thing that Evan said. We've seen a lot of increase in the past few years. I'd say before COVID hit, probably the past three to three and a half to four years, just through the day drop-in center, the homeless day service center. So we can have anywhere from 20 folks on a slow day to 60 to 70 people coming through our doors to get a shower, do some laundry, get food. We partner with local agencies and churches to bring in donations and also to just set up appointments and to get into the housing services. And so it's basically the first come, first serve like the entry point to housing services in the whole county, pretty much. We do refer to family promise to Athens area homeless shelter. If the client would meet their services or meet the criteria for their services a little better than ours. So we got a lot of people coming in. We're trying to, like a better term, kind of triage them and assess their needs and then determine if they'd be a good fit for the programs I mentioned or a program that my other, my fellow program manager is over. She's kind of over more of a residential programs which are a little higher level of care, people with maybe some more severe mental health issues. That's our crisis respite program, which is a transitional housing program, mental health residential. And then for forensics, which is actually people who have been mentally unfit to stay in trial, that's referrals to the state. And then, yeah, door to housing voucher, our housing support program. Yeah, and John Morris. Cool, yeah, my name's John Morris. I oversee our street outreach and hotel voucher programs. These are my position titles, Thrive Community Programs Team Lead because the hotel voucher and street outreach are both community based. I'll start with street outreach. Our mission in street outreach is to meet unsheltered individuals where they're at and support them where they're at and meeting their own self-defined goals where at least taking steps towards their own self-defined goals. We have four primary values that we stick to as we do that, meet clients with empathy. So seek to know them, to know them well, to understand or learn parts of their story or parts of their life that have gotten in there and connect with them at an emotional level, validating their experience, their feelings and their opinions. Second, advocacy, we believe that our clients need effective advocates to overcome systemic barriers that may be in place or road bumps that they're inevitably gonna hit because it's not easy getting out of homelessness. We also have honesty as one of our values. We, the way I explain that one is we don't ever try to do a bait and switch. We don't tell someone, hey, this program's a cake block, you know, this treatment program's perfect for you. It'll be easy, everyone will be kind to you when in reality, they're gonna be living in dorm style living with a bunch of other people and it's gonna be close quarters. So we try to tell clients honestly what programs are like and if there's an elephant in the room, address it openly and compassionately. Our last one is autonomy, our last value. So we believe in eliciting clients' autonomy, allowing them to define what their goals are and steps in that process, right? So I can prescribe a solution, I can see what in my perspective is a solution, but my client is not going to latch on or run with that solution if it's not their own solution. And I find sometimes my quick fixes are not real fixes for my clients and are not effective. And so by partnering with clients and allowing them to be autonomous and make decisions for themselves, it's my job to actually show them what doors are available, what paths are available, it's their job to walk down it and my job to support them as they walk down that path. So we're on bridges in the woods, downtown, wherever people are at, meeting them where they're at, being full-time resource connectors, resource navigators, and ultimately compassionate teammates to our clients. So that's street outreach. Our hotel voucher program is a 30 to 60 day transitional housing program. It's really supposed to be 30 days. It is not likely that we are fighting housing for people in 30 days. We like to use it as a transition from homelessness to housing. And so our goal is ultimately to be taking people who we have a housing track for and a reasonable expectation to get into a housing program within that 30 to 60 days. We do take some emergency referrals, but for the most part, we're looking for people that have, obviously everyone could benefit from a hotel room and I know and recognize I wish I could put all my clients in hotel rooms, but we also operate in hotels that have other guests in the hotels and have a hotel manager in hotel management that will not work with us if our hotel clients are not doing what they're supposed to be doing in the hotel program. So we're looking for relatively low behavioral risk for clients in that program, but relatively high circumstantial need, whether that's medical need, somebody who is on oxygen 24 seven, somebody who got hit by a car and had emergency surgery and has nowhere to recover. Somebody who just finished detox and has a 10 day gap between when their treatment bed will be available at the recovery program they're going to, different circumstances like that. We make those decisions on a staff basis. We staff all the referrals that we get. So, and ultimately looking to use that as a place that we transition them into whatever that next level of assistance is, whether that's permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing, a treatment program, something like that. So, those are my two programs. Good stuff. Can you go to the next slide? So, this is just kind of an overview. I'm not going to go into the details here. Obviously, if anybody is interested. One of the things I want to point out that some of you guys probably know, but I'm going to go ahead and take a shot that maybe this is a new revelation to you. Homelessness is complicated. There is never one reason why someone finds themselves experiencing homelessness. Another thing, and this is one of those things that, you know, I get to, I've been working with the homeless population since volunteering at the Atherbury homeless shelter in Barra Street back in 1998. We tend to, and I do this all the time, homeless people, the homeless population. We're working with homeless people. This is a program for homeless people. We work with individuals and families who experience homelessness. These are people first that are experiencing a situation. And there are so many different reasons why that individual or that family found themselves in this situation. In many cases, particularly the ones that we are working with, these guys have been in that situation three, four, five, 10, 15 years. Or they may have just newly discovered their reason. They may be battling addiction. They may be battling mental illness. They may be battling vote. They may have a developmental disability. They may have a criminal history. They may have really terrible credit. They've made a lot of mistakes. We are not a very forgiving society. And once you make a mistake, that mistake can follow you for every job application, every housing application. And this is what we get to work with. And helping this individual or this family solve an issue. And it's one of those things that many of us may take for granted as far as finding a job, you need an ID, finding a job, you need a driver's license. How do you get that when you watch reversals when you're living outside? How do you get that when you haven't been able to take a shower or have a clean place to stay for a week or two weeks? So getting through that process and once someone does, get that spark. And that's what we live for. Because please believe me, we are not making money. We are not getting rich due to this circumstance. Those two guys back there told us to the wheel, the grinding stone, we have to account for every single little penny. And we have to make sure that these pennies are providing those services that we said that we had to provide. And there's a lot of work and documentation, but it's all worth it when that individual figures it out or that spark comes on, that light comes on. And we get to see some of these outcomes. And some of these, and, but that being said, it's a complicated piece. And we also, I think you can do that next time, try to remember where we are on the ground. Here we go. These are some of the things that we do get to experience. And John and John have an entire team dedicated to working with these individuals as they try to navigate stable housing, getting into a space. And we talked about the rapid reality program and we serve so many individuals and this is a great program, independent style. These are leases in the individual's name. So if the individual had a criminal history in the past, the landlords can decide not to do it. We have one individual, I love, this is one of our favorite clients that we talk about, I feel like every day almost, having a salt charge back in 1994 was denied housing. This is an individual who's half blind and you can blow on him if you follow. But he had a salt charge back in 1994. What are you gonna do? These are the things that we had. We'd get to deal with. And again, as I mentioned, we are not very forgiving. The landlords that we have to work with, it's a matter of relationship development and telling them that these scary homeless people are not gonna come in and disrupt your place. They may be compensable. We make two promises, we will pay the rent and we will respond. And unfortunately, when we're working with our population, it's that 10 to 20% have the problems and experienced those issues. They label it for the rest of the population. And that's not the case. That is not reality. That these are individuals that have come through and we're looking for chances. And that's what we get to do. We get to work with the Athens area homeless families out there, the structuring candidates, the school programs, the sparrowsness, the bigger visions of the Salvation Army as a community response, because believe me, we all talk to each other and we communicate very well. I mean, there's all the times where, I don't know, I might not see eye to eye to shake on something. But we're all talking. And that's one of the brilliant parts that, I've been in this working for years in this community. We've got a really strong network, but there are still gaps. People still fall between the cracks. And a lot of it is not up to us. And it's not up to Andrew and his team. A lot of it is the community. When we're looking at some of these things, unemployment, underemployment, we've got a housing process nationwide, rents are skyrocketing, the wages have become stagnant. So what do we do there when we're, you know, we're trying to navigate this process? Right now, and think about this too, when we're thinking about those outcomes, what we were doing, the 27%, it didn't work. We have limits to how much rent we can pay because these are federal dollars and the federal government has determined that there's fair market rent standards. So some of the apartment complexes aren't the best neighborhoods for some of our individuals who are maybe not even in active recovery, maybe still struggling with addiction. And they get to live across the hallway from an argument. How is it, but those are the, some of the limited choices we have as a community on where to place an individual, is it better for the same individual to live under a bridge or across the hall from the drug dealer? It's a hard decision to make, you know, when we're trying to work with them. Care, you know, but please have faith that we are aware and we're working with the police department. We've got formal agreements, we've corresponded to here's so much stuff, I can talk all night long. So please, road me in if I need to. We are, we are a little over time. We are a little over time. We're so, we're here with that slide. It's been a cumulative effect of all my bull over time. I'm going to blame you for it. I'm going to blame the commissioner. I could have been, I should have been more of a, more on top. But these things as far as what we, what we look to, and you know, I'm going to, you know, say this in front of Jesse and in front of everybody here. That 27% is what's breaking my heart. You know, we're doing some good stuff, you know, with the individual and being able to house. But it's that 27% that keep coming back to our places and keep going in and out of the jails, in and out of the hospitals, and just can't figure it out. And many of you, you know, we are in the second chance, third chance, fourth chance business. People screw up. I, through no fault of my own, was born with this color skin to a white suburban upper middle class family. These individuals, I made a lot of the same mistakes. Some of these individuals made, I had two parents that supported me. And I had a surgery. Some of, you know, a lot of these guys, they didn't. And they need that second and third and fourth chance. And they need a forgiving society. And they need some empowerment, tough love, you know, and some consequences and some carry, you know. So with all of that, what's been difficult is that sort of unstructured independent style living for some of these guys. What we're really trying to develop. And part of that is with the spouse development that we're trying to look to is more of a structured, non-connergy 24-7 on-site support service type residential space where individuals can go and have, not worry about the drug dealer across the hall, but being in a community where there's recovery. And there's other people going through some of the same stuff they're going through with 24-7 on-site staff to support that and transition them out. So instead of being put into a home that's not in the best neighborhood where you've got, I don't know, you've just been out of the crisis center and you've got 24 hours of sobriety and you're saying, good luck. Maybe they have 60 to 90 to 180 days and they know coping skills and they've been able to kind of discover a way to deal with some of the issues that they've been dealing with and they've got to follow that. That's what we're trying to work forward to. And that's part of that continuum. Some of them, I can't remember whether it was Jesse or Andrew, that we are behold to the federal government and those priorities. Rapid rehousing. They did away with transitional housing, to Shady Shabram, to my frustration. I do. But we are a continuum and we need, there are many pathways to recovery. There are many reasons why individuals find themselves in that situation. We need solutions that are more person-centered and can meet the needs. Some of these individuals, they do really well in their own apartment. Other individuals need a little bit more structure. And I think what would really help us strategically as a community is to provide that avenue so that individuals can navigate and we can keep the door open. So that's my soapbox. That's my studio. Any questions, comments, criticisms. We're open to criticisms as well. We have one more person to present. And then I get related and I'll be right back. Here are my questions. This is for all the service providers tonight slash pretty much everyone. Are these slides available for us to engage with after tonight? That's up to Jesse, because I didn't really have any. Yes. Seeing the nods, the answer is yes. Okay. Thank you very much. All right, so Jason Leonard's coming up here. And listen, honestly, it's a good thing that they ran over because, y'all, those are the experts, right? HCD, Advantage, Athens area. These are like the front lines, boots on the ground, people out there doing this work. I am no expert. Commissioner Huell invited me to come to the town hall. I've been a business owner in downtown since 1999. I had some transition in my life. I sit on the Downtown Development Authority and through that position on the Downtown Development Authority, I got introduced to the homeless coalition. I've sat on the homeless coalition for going on four years, I believe, now. So those two things kind of work hand in hand, just being downtown all the time, getting to meet some folks downtown that are experiencing homelessness that I know. And I just wanted to learn and see how I could help. What I could do, just in general, I don't have, well, I guess, Commissioner Huell made some slides. I don't have any slides. I just pulled up the website with your name. So like I said, I'm no expert, but I wanted to learn and see how I could get engaged and see if I could help or if I could contribute. So since then, I do have a business downtown, but I also work in real estate and I work, and I try to work on housing solutions. So I don't necessarily work in like traditional, hey, I want to sell my house, you was calling me up, but we're working on bigger housing solutions for the community, which is a slow go at it, but it's definitely giving me an inside glimpse as to how these processes work. One person I worked with sat down with John Morris just recently and explained the timeline. John, what did he say the timeline from start to finish on trying to get a real estate project like Neighborhood? So I sat down with my problem with Jason and Jason had a developer friend that came and joined us and he was sharing, I think that it takes about a year to get to where you can move dirt and another year to get to where you can put stuff on the dirt you moved, just in terms of like going through a full planning process. Again, and that's not because anyone, it's just how much you're going to take through this. How much time it takes to go start to finish and all be processed and then just even to the mall earlier. Things like that. It's a long process. If it goes smooth, I mean three years from beginning to end to having a product on the ground. So we have to be thinking out from just today on how we cope with these housing solutions. So being a real estate agent, I just sat up there and looked, we have 170 residential houses, of those 70, I just counted real quick, are $350,000 or less. So even at 170, that's about 1.3% of Athens population minus UGM. So there's literally no housing out there. I mean, even if you had $700,000, you would probably struggle to find housing in this community. And yet the population keeps growing. I mean, I heard a statistic that we have 40,000 commuters daily into Athens that could be residents here, could contribute to our tax base, but instead they have nowhere to live. So Jason, before we kind of get into the discourse, do you want to just share briefly the coalition board that you're on? I think you were telling me before this meeting that the number of seats on the board has expanded. Just kind of like how can people get involved as members? So John's on the executive board for the homeless coalition. I'll contribute or attribute it to them, the executive team and HCD for the homeless coalition. They've really rallied some support and we've had an influx of applicants to that board. And it's very exciting. I mean, it's an exciting time being able to work with HCD on the art funds. I mean, it's a great opportunity long-term and I'm just fortunate to be a part of the conversation. I'll share a little bit about the coalition and in terms of like what is the homeless coalition specifically doing, we are, you heard the reference to the COC grant. So we are the embodiment of that COC in collaboration with the Housing and Community Development Department of Athens-Barr County to get that $700 something thousand. $818 thousand. $818 thousand grant per year that funds housing projects in Athens. Not all of them, but a portion of that larger pie of homeless services that come from a variety of funding streams. So our homeless coalition helps in collaboration with HCD meet the requirements of HUD to get those funds. But our homeless coalition is not a direct service provider. There are no paid staff at the homeless coalition. It's a volunteer board of homeless service providers and community members who essentially work together to host general body meetings open to the public throughout the year, some monthly work groups, and then do whatever HUD requires of us to do to get that $818 thousand to Athens. And one more thing and I'd like to get to the dialogue part. You know, we went on this trip to Tuscaloosa in Birmingham. We visited with some folks from one roof, folks from Advantage met us out there as well. You were on that trip. I recall them talking about who you want involves in your continuum of care and in your coalition. And you want people to size just service providers involved. So could you speak to that maybe? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is critical that there are service care providers on that board because it really, you know, there are occasions with the COC grant where they have to get into, we have to get into nitty gritty details related to service care providers. But also, you know, it is just like anything, you want to have diversity in a good cross-section of representation. So despite our board seats being full right now, I'll leave some cards and you can reach out to myself or John and if you'd like to get involved or engaged, send me a mail, call me, shoot me a text. You also don't have to be on the board to be involved. You can attend the meetings. Thank you guys every other month. A quarter of each year. A quarter of each month. We'll be posting the 2023 calendar, hopefully in the next few weeks on the Honor website. And we'll be revising some of the committees on there as well and there's always space for anyone to get engaged in a committee that, you know, interests you. So if anyone here is not already connected with the Athens Homeless Coalition and wants to be, could you raise your hand if you're a good point of contact and reach out to you before you leave? Jason, John, all right. So Jason and John, please connect with one of those two if you can before you go. We really need more folks involved. And thank you all for being here. I mean, just being engaged at this level is great. So I want to think of how we have remaining gone a bit over time with similar presentations, but we'll consider 745 the hard stop time no matter how exciting and robust this conversation is. I do want to give us time to take some breaths and get out the door and still be out of here by about eight. So I'm going to ask everybody before we get into the discourse to just take a minute to like process all the dense information we've heard. And then I'm going to facilitate a discussion on what I like to call stack. Anybody has any thought or question? Just raise your hand. I'm going to make a note. I'll call on people in the order of people have spoken. So if you've spoken a lot already, you might have to wait until other people to raise their hand after you spoke. And I'll try to kind of bounce things between experts who can answer questions better than me and myself, but also, really, I hope that this can be a discourse among us. The other thing I wanted to note for this, and I'm sorry that I'm, oh yeah, when we do start to speak, if you're involved with an organization, like I see you have some new leaders in the room, for example, if you want to just mention that, if you feel comfortable and inclined, like your name and who you're with, just so folks in the room can kind of get a feel for who we're sitting among as we go. But feel free to raise your hand, and I'm literally going to wait a silent minute before I start calling on people. When I point at you, I've got you written down. Did I see, should I see our neighborhood leaders raising their hands? No? I got to get out of here. I had kids saying, oh yeah, I can introduce myself, though, excuse me, but I've been busy on it, sorry. But I'm the new neighborhood leader for Cleveland Roads on it. So I can thank God I had some busy cars in the car, and I'm running back home. But also, I've never been here yet, but I volunteer in a band every Tuesday, I do. I just snap out of each every evening. And tomorrow, I'm having a blankie toast ride and feeding them tomorrow. They're lazy, so y'all can come. Yeah, Shade and Celia are two of our neighborhood leaders among many, they've helped a lot with a lot of the direct outreach that used to happen, facilitating some of the collaboration. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much. I'm gonna wait till I see one more hand coming for you. How much? Is anybody else here legit for me being so many? I'm sorry. Comfortable silence, it's good. Yeah, it is. All right, let's start with Emma. I have a question for folks from the Atkins House Homeless Coalition. I see that you guys have free membership for people who are experiencing homelessness. I was just wondering if you had any statistics about your membership with unhoused individuals. Yeah, so right now, honestly, membership, we've just kind of used that form for certain purposes on our board. We have two individuals with lived experience, not currently unhoused. I absolutely recognize that in terms of general body attendance to meetings that turn out amongst people currently experiencing homelessness is very low. That's something that I know is a priority of our board. We just went from six board members to 16 and things have really fallen off with the Homeless Coalition in terms of we've just kind of met our basic necessities to get those funds in the past two and a half years. I imagine our hope is in collaboration with the strategic planning process to leverage the voices of people experiencing homelessness and welcome them with open arms and encourage them to be the center of conversation and dialogue within the Homeless Coalition and the strategic planning process moving forward. Well, I guess I'll follow up with that. Do you guys have any idea of what kind of outreach you want to do to really get people involved, like unhoused folks, and I'll like, hey, these are when our annual meetings are running for calendar selling. Is there a plan for that at all? There's not a plan for that right now. I can say overseeing our street outreach program, empowerment's a big part of what we're doing in street outreach. And serving on the board, I know that within the outreach that we do, now that we have built the Homeless Coalition's capacity, starting to build it back up with the full board again, I think our next goal is to continue to leverage community members experiencing homelessness to be more involved in that. So is there a concrete plan right now? No, but once that 2023 calendar, when we figure out what that's gonna look like when it comes out, I certainly hope and plan to utilize some of our efforts in the street outreach that we're already doing to make sure unhoused individuals know about Homeless Coalition meetings and feel welcome and invited to participate in them. All right, thank you. Yeah. Good, Jean. I just wondered what the resources that are available can they expand on the tent city area or build like tiny houses anywhere for some of these homeless people so that there's more places for them to live? I'll try to fill that question to start. I definitely welcome any further information folks from HCE or other aspect of the ride. You know, the truth is, I think Andrew showed the slide that almost $10 million has been spent in the past couple of years. He's got about $7 million that we've got being able to spend. And there's some folks in the room who've worked on development housing issues in the past and may be aware that that $7 million doesn't go very far when you start trying to really set up proper buildings for people to live in. And then especially if you want a staff that there's not a real emphasis on, I think, on permanent supportive housing or other supportive sorts of housing. And so if you want to help address the needs of, there's wasn't included here, it wasn't a past presentation. We actually, this is not a good advice. It's fine. It's fine, I'm a fan. It's fine. I'll get sprangles. I'll get sprangles. I'll get sprangles. A majority of the people visibly homeless in this community, you know, there's a difference between visible and invisible homelessness, because there's probably an even greater number, CCSD, for example, has a different and much larger number of people who are homeless, most of them youth, who are homeless but not necessarily visibly on the corner or sleeping outside under a bridge, but they're couch surfing or maybe they're sleeping in a car with their parents or something, you know, they're in a different situation. You know, the housing they need might just be regular housing if their families can find it. We can find people who are willing to rent it or sell it, you know, to the amount that people can afford and maybe with some assistance they can navigate the process of getting through that despite some barriers people might have. But for a lot of the folks, a majority of the folks who show up in the point of time count, they've been homeless for, I think, close it over two years, over 50% of the people in that count, and the vast majority of people who are experiencing homelessness in this community, their last residence, was in Athens. So these are people who are from here and have been experiencing this problem for a long time. So those are folks that just having a tiny house or a building is enough for you to have more. So we talk about like the high price tag of the current sanction in Canton. You know, many people have really balked at the two and a half million that's taken to get that off the ground and that's basically because the county funded 100% of that program. It's also on land the county already owns. The moment we try to get land we don't already own. The moment we want to rehab a building that's already there and bring it up to code, the moment we want to build structures and all those things are gonna cost a lot more. So I think part of what we've gotta figure out is how to provide exactly what you're talking about in a way that's sustainable. What organizations can we partner with? What kind of fundraising can be done? What kind of grants can be sought? What kind of moving around of the budget perhaps could the county do? Because a lot of what we've been able to rely on, kind of the blessing of the curse of the pandemic is this federal money that carries money and now the ARPA money. But that's, none of us are expecting that to come back. And so how do we use that five million to get us moving forward? I think some of what you're suggesting, Gene, is along the path of what I think a lot of us would like to see, about how exactly we do that, who's gonna run it, and who's gonna work in a place like that day in and day out are some big questions. There is also, no one mentioned it yet I think, except I don't have to mention it briefly, there's this mental health recovery facility project that had managed to get off the ground. That was on our slops 2020. When it was first pitched, the budget for that project was double what got approved in the final list of projects. We all know that the cost of everything skyrocketed since 2020. So the cost of seeing that through is more than double what is currently allocated. Now we've actually allocated some of ARPA money for mental health specifically and it's likely that the decision will be made soon. I can't speak definitively because I'm on a body of 10 or currently nine commissioners and the mayor, I don't have to set the agenda myself, but I anticipate that we will soon be moving forward on moving an additional chunk of money from ARPA toward that separate from the five million you see there, what you've seen allocated as mental health specifically. That still doesn't get us fully there. And then there are other affordable housing investments with ARPA money that may play into some of what you're talking about too. We discussed that at the last town hall kind of a length I think, but all that still, it's chipping away across from the bucket. Bethel's gonna get renovated into this North downtown project. Anyone who's been living there will be able to move into the new nicer units and there will be even more designated affordable units afterward than there currently are, plus a bunch of closer to market rate units. But even all that doesn't keep up with the growth in our population that we're seeing year over year. But I say all that to say that there's a lot of information I kind of rattled off about slides to a company. And when we talk about like how do we expand a project we've got going and how do we take something that's kind of designed to be transitional temporary and make it more permanent. I think we need to be really thoughtful about like who are we partnering with? How's that gonna be staffed and how are we gonna sustain that funding? That's gonna be a big riddle for us. Do you have anything to add, Belinda? Sure. Best practice technically is not having people outside. So we don't wanna look at an expansion of that. That was a direct response to the increase of our homeless population that were outside and where they were really congregating was becoming hazardous or quite hazardous. So it was a great reaction. What we would like to create though is more permanent solutions. Getting people, the housing first model is the ideal as far as getting people off the street into housing and then connect them with those services. So I won't be surprised to see the homeless strategy really emphasizes increasing shelter, emergency shelter, maybe housing vouchers, maybe even supporting that middle step of transitional housing department supportive. As far as the tiny houses that has been proposed, that is something that has to go through the rezoning approval. Currently the zoning does not, in Atkins Park County does not allow for tiny houses. So it's not a solution that we can consider until a rezoning takes place in that respect. But that would be something that could be seriously considered, especially as Evan was talking about, there's single people doing really well in their own housing where they're not sharing, but maybe in a community where there's service close or on-site. Did you just want to hear your hand? Yeah, do you mind if I get you just a second? I got you on my list though. One thing I will add to that too, yes, tiny homes are not currently allowed by code, but things can happen even if it's not allowed by code if you go through a variance process, right? We see that happen all the time. Now those processes are more expensive if someone wants to engage in that privately. If it's something that the government is somehow engaged in helping fund, it might be able to lubricate it a bit, but again, we still deal with other complications we're going to go to if I get you on the list now. Want to go to Susan next? I've got like five quick questions. Evan, sorry. Out of the 99 in HMIS, what approximately is the percentage of seniors 65 and older who are living on social security? The 99 in HMIS. The percentage of people over 65? Well yeah, the ones that are stuck living on social security. Yeah, I would say a very low percentage. I have it off the top of my head, but I would say it's a low percentage. The lifespan of homeless individuals is not really that long. So we typically don't see people very many people living in that area. I see, I'm all over the place. And I see a ton of seniors. In fact, I've brought seniors to you for housing and I see it over and over and over and over again. So got something to say to that, John? I was just saying maybe just from my context, a lot of folks, I'd say that a lot of age demographic I'm working with on the older end are people in their 50s. When I get people in their 60s or even later than that, try to do housing authority referral because they definitely prioritize older individuals. Try to get people to referrals to any kind of permanent, or if somebody has the medical need for personal care. Now we do see a lot of people under the age of 60 that are on a fixed income through SSDI. The most common amount we see on fixed income is $841 a month, which we all know living off $841 a month for rent. If you're lucky and you get something in food stamps to cover rent utilities, whatever your basic needs are and maybe you get some help from food stamps is not sustainable in a free market, housing on your own. And those people, it's very hard to find housing. Daughtery Street with the studio apartments, they're renting those for 400 to 500 a month to long term sustained 65 year old alcoholics. I'm gonna put that in front of them. That was a great resource thing to bring up. I will say though, it is a small percentage and even across advantages, you know, the whole 10,000 to 11,000, there's not very many people that are over 65. Well, 55, whatever, you know, I'm just okay. I got it. Susan, I'm gonna ask you to pick your one next best one just because I got a lot of people who say I have to raise them many times. Okay, we'll have time at the end for you to, I'll save yours for later. TCA, or no, actually, what I'd like to know is can, happens behaviorally, can they divert money to rehab places like the Palm House for people who want to get into rehab as opposed to sticking them into a rapid rehousing apartment? To rehab places? Yes, like the Palm House, we have about 130 rehab places all over the county. I thought you meant to divert money to rehabilitate those properties. No, no, no, no, no. So can we use those? We do, you can do that. We actually have a SAMHSA grant that we do provide. So, you know, we partner with, we partner with the acceptance of the Palm House a lot of different freshmen to pay for the initial fee and... Can you pay for the whole program? I mean, if you have, if you're housing somebody in rapid rehousing who's housing addiction, who's now mallock, like, you know, which is one of the predominant things, and putting them in rapid rehousing for six to nine months and paying everything, and then they go out drinking again, wouldn't the money be better spent in rehab facilities? Got a lot of money for rapid rehousing, doesn't allow that. You can't... We can't divert housing. It's their lease. We can't divert out the funding that we can use through another grant that's not in rapid rehousing that we can do, but of course, there's not a lot of... So you can divert money into rehab to divert people. No, I agree. The federal government is very strict in what it allows and what it allows. I'm gonna pause this just because I think a lot of people raise their hands, but like this kind of detail, which is great to get into, like if anyone's available to talk more after and wants to, please, please do. If not, happy to help pass along questions. I also serve on the Advantage Board in addition to that one that you mentioned. So I got Helene next. Athens Transit Authority. Our system, whatever it's called, I probably should know the answer to this question. Are people who cannot afford transportation, are they allowed to come on and travel? Transit. Transit. On the bus. Yeah, well, the bus is... Is it free? They're free forever. Well, that's not what I thought. So everybody can... Whether they have money in their pocket or not. Right, well, again, I'm starting to say that I may be taking the bus once, but it's when you still have to pay. And so I just thought that probably would make a difference. And then also, I have occasion to meet the woman who is a client of Advantage, that are at Porch Festival places. And she was kind of telling us her life story. But I got the impression, not necessarily from her, but just heard that agencies are having a hard time with employment, like every other business in town. Is that impacting your services? We're limited to, you know, everybody can be able to us to pay on the bus. We don't pay very well. I think, you know, these guys will be the first to tell you, we don't really pay very well on the bus. And... Maybe not the good business, though. Yeah, we try to have our sort of benefits. But, you know, and that's not just an agency, or Athens, that's a statewide nation, where there is a shortage of social groups and we really desperately need some. We've got funding for a co-responder partnership with the county that has approved funds to provide an employee, licensed clinical social workers, to partner with police officers to do emergency response. And we cannot find individuals to apply for those positions, which is what I'm saying. Because it's obviously impacted this individual. There is a guy, we're not meeting the need. It's, you can use an analogy, it's like drinking from a fire, you know, trying to figure out. And to your transit bus question, I had an opportunity to do a thing. The transit system is great. And it's a great thing, but it doesn't always work on time and run on time. And something else, just to keep in mind, some of the jobs and the positions that some of our individuals can and do a platform to get employed for, where they're relying on public transportation. It's not always on time. Some of these employers aren't as forgiving as some of, you know, mindful, or if I'm 15 minutes late, you know, so there's a level of, you know, sort of precariousness associated with relying on a public transit system. And it can be confusing. I've done it where to go and when to go and the, you know, that kind of stuff, especially if you're really, really new to the system. I'll add it real quickly. I've got you all in my list. There is, from our public information office, the school hand up, which includes our active service, active surveys, including transit service expansion. So please take a look at that. Expansion. Expansion is talking both about locations and service hours. So how often do the buses run where they go? And probably that mall development, again, I can't say for sure because I'm not privy to information that anyone else here in the room isn't. But I'm expecting, I'm anticipating based on what I've heard so far, including what was shared at the last town hall and what they've said it since to the planning department that, and what we're seeing through the discourse for the TAD district, tax allocation district 20, that one of the three transit hubs, satellite stations, is likely to be on the campus of the mall redevelopment. So hopefully that will also enable greater service to this part of the county specifically. All right, you got Celia next. I'm the neighborhood leader for the Timothy zone, which Jembe is currently still a commissioner of, part of, but not for long. The change piece act. But my question is probably a yes or no for you guys. I work with a lot of people who have been through the hotel bathroom program, but then either didn't stay, couldn't stay for whatever reason. And are living in hotels. Lots of hotels are not accepting the DCA funds. Is there any kind of assistance for hotel rent? I think the county has a couple contracts they're trying to get completed, right? That have vertical assistance. Yeah, so our CBGCB, maybe it'll be hard. We have to get, for that we have to specifically contact HUD because it technically doesn't need the standard rental assistance, but it doesn't mean we can't do it. So we have to do it kind of on a case by case basis. And I've done it before. I've been on the phone with HUD three, four different times that I can recall, but they asked for very specific criteria. And then they base their decision, we guess or no, that can be applied to that specific case or not. I've actually got you next. So I'll have one quick thing and then see, we're always trying to balance the immediacy of need with long-term plan, like how do we be strategic and do some of this long-term stuff, but like how do we help people who are currently very much suffering, very much old. And I think your questions really speaks to like, we're talking about how to wisely spend what we have that might be more flexible. How much of it do we put into things that will mitigate certain types of people currently in the situation? And how much of it do we put towards things that look more like that supportive housing that can hopefully somehow be cdd to last? Jay, I know you've probably got a million thoughts and I welcome a half a million of them. First of all, I really, I have been telling people at AHS that something that, see, I thought that cd, cddg, cdmoney was gonna go into hotel systems and vouchers. Are there no contracts for that? She's talking about people that are already residing in shell-in the hotels as a rental housing, which is totally different than bringing someone off the street on duty. So yes, we are funding the hotel voucher so that people can be brought into it from the street. But what she's talking about is, would be more like the rapid rehousing potentially for someone using, that doesn't have a lease, it could be tricky. Gotcha, sorry, I had something to say. No, that's okay. Thanks, Shay, cause I was gonna have a conversation with her afterwards about that. Yeah, I was not worried about that. I, honestly, I can't remember. I know that I wanted to say with the tiny houses and you touched on this, that tiny houses are, it's frustrating, I think, for homeless service providers sometimes because there's so much attention around that and they've been touted as such a success. And they are, for some populations, for certain populations, they work really, really well with veterans, for example, and with other, again, very small select subsections, but it's not a blanket solution and it doesn't work well for everyone. How long would tiny homes help the average family that you, the average family that you have as a client, how long would a tiny home work for them? It wouldn't. Oh, not for a family. Yeah, it wouldn't. No, it's like a one or two person. What's the, do you know what the most recent data is from CCSD on the number of kids? I don't know what it is right this second. I want to say in September they were already, Andrew, you might know, too. They were in the hundreds already. And to give you an idea, the last year with a fully accurate count was 900 and something children in 2019. And those are just the school-aged children that are being identified as experiencing homelessness. So we're also still engaged with the school district. Exactly. A teenager who dropped out of school two years ago but is still under 18 and a part of that figure. And I know I've heard stories from some people in the room about actual people that they would refer to. Yeah, and children have been brought up a lot. Here in this community, most are not on a company. Some are, for sure. But most are in family units. It's not as visible. And the question is- I just want to always make it a point to say that over 50% of your homeless population people think of that individual, lonely person out on the street, that is the best just one facet. Over 50% of the majority of the homeless population are children under the age of 18. And that long-time count that people refer to a lot, how accurately does that capture the children? Only the shelter. Only the shelter. To give you an idea of what you have about the community. Oh, sorry, sorry to talk about the shelter. Only the people who were in a shelter the day that count was done. Correct. So when the school district has a figure of close to 1,000 children in a year, not all 1,000 are homeless that entire year, right? Correct. And any of them who are staying in a home or something that's not part of a shelter that's checked on is not part of that point of time count. So, again, I know the point of time count gets referenced a lot. It's good for acknowledging trends like Andrew and Linus go to. But there are, is severely under-representing the number of people in a given year who experience this problem. I know you had more to add, but I want to get to the next person. I'll also say with that, too, that the school district typically has a social worker that's dedicated to working with students experiencing homelessness. And they took that away. They no longer have it. Now it's consolidated with the head of the social work department. And so we're going to see a drop in how many kids are identified, too. We don't even have a family engagement specialist right now, so that also is part of it. Oh, no, we do. Yes, we do. We have a family engagement specialist. Timothy does it. Oh, Timothy does it? We had one. She didn't show up. It was taken out of the budget. Yeah. So, all of that is really frustrating. And to give you guys an idea, we have about 80 kids in shelter housing at any of the four at a JAS and one of our programs. So it's huge in about 40 families on our way list at this point. Matt, I actually had you next up on my list. I see you're about to leave. Did you have a question or a thought before you go? Oh, that's all right. I got a couple of comments on here. So you're good? I'm good. Okay. Yeah, I know we're over the time. I said I would consider it hard to stop, but I have two more people down. So Nancy, did you have something to say? I was just wondering if there is, in a way, a habitat for humanity couldn't be involved. They are. They are. They are involved. Yes, ma'am. Actually, from Appalachia. And we have had families go into the small houses and they have had the mother, the father, and just two children. They're not allowed to have any more. But the problem is, is we have some children that are sleeping under porches. They're sleeping in cars. They do not have a home per se, but I know in West Virginia, they do not consider them homeless. But I do consider them homeless. Yeah, that's fast. If they're in the car, they're homeless. If it is outside, it's homeless, and a car is homeless. Yes, they're outside. Any place not meant for habitation is homeless. They're out there, they are outside. Then that is just someone trying to ignore the truth. Well, I also think it's somebody who doesn't have enough money at the budget. And are probably trying to hide, which I understand, even with your children taking from you. So it's a real truth. I got John as my last person on stage when we were here a while ago. You guys. We're dating. We're about 10 up here. So I'm gonna move away from here to over there. Please, before you go, if you haven't already filled out that survey, that includes those that you all presented. I'd really love to hear your feedback on how we can make this better. And also, you'll see some TBGs on the calendar. And a lot of what's available for me in the next couple of months is very TBG, because you may have noticed, my partner in the corner who's been helping out tonight, Megan, is very pregnant. Mm-hmm. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. So part of what's been the hangup for the next town hall, the next community cleanup and things is I'm trying to find someone who can reliably co-host. Which might turn into being the host if I'm in the hospital or something. So just keep an ear to the ground for those. But please do fill out those surveys. And then lastly, I've got my cards on me. Anyone who doesn't already, my cell phone is the best way to reach me. Try to keep up with my email that I can't. I don't think I ever will. So if you ever reach up my email and don't hear back, please do call or text me. Thank you very much for being here tonight. Please, you know, one more round for the host. Yeah. Oh, and Shadei Watkins, one of the neighborhood leaders of this zone. And like a little highway, please, you know, please don't have to leave, but she did.