BY JENNIFER CABRERA
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At their October 8 meeting, the Alachua County Commission heard a presentation on homeless outreach across the Continuum of Care (CoC) service area and voted to extend the street outreach contract, coordinate with surrounding counties, and ask the CoC to come back with plans to implement the recommendations in the presentation.
National Alliance to End Homelessness presentation
The County engaged with the National Alliance to End Homelessness to evaluate their street outreach effort, and their representative Diiv Sternman presented their three main findings.
First, Sternman said the County has an “excellent street outreach program, and I don’t think I can say that strongly enough… They’re operating with a high fidelity to evidence-based practices that work for engaging folks who are living unsheltered and for moving folks into housing successfully. They’re housing 39% of their program participants directly from the street, and that is higher than we see in almost any high-functioning street outreach program across the country… But they’re severely under-resourced… and that was true just in the city of Gainesville, and it became even more true when we… look farther out into the rural counties.” Sternman also said that access to street outreach in Bradford, Gilchrist, Levy, and Putnam Counties is inadequate; all of those are under the same Continuum of Care umbrella as Alachua County.