for your our delay we had one of our panelists who was depending on public transportation in the doors would literally not open to a letter off to come and talk with us tonight and we are missing  we're missing one of our one of our panelists who i think may be stuck in traffic coming up from a south king county so if she's able to join us we will will bring up onstage and have her contribute to this conversation so hopefully all of you know a little bit about solid ground we are community action agency been in this community for over forty years we work to end poverty we work to address oppression and racism and we work to bring community together and i think all of us in this room know that our region is facing an incredible homeless and housing crisis there are people in desperate need for services and we're getting lots of advice on how to address our services including scaling up rapidly housing aligning our services and i say our i mean all housing providers to the federal government's changing expectations and some models and so we thought would be really important to have a community conversation with people who actually are funders and set out those expectations people who provide those services people who have been affected and dependent upon those kind of services and that's the purpose of tonight's conversation we will have an opportunity for you to make posed questions to the panelist but our hope is that this is a conversation that starts here and it's one that continues out into the community and as a result we have a community more informed more equitable and more supportive of those who are in need of housing stability and i think i have covered everything and i'll turn it over to our moderator who is kate walters so we may not recognize her by voice but she is a producer of the show the record and has extensive experience reporting on homelessness her and her team she's done some reporting called the jungle and other related issues and so i ask you to please welcome kate and get this conversation well one time i will ask that when you get that chance you keep those questions fairly brief so we can get through as many as possible so before i introduce our panelists i want to make sure that we're on the same page so we're here to talk about rapid rate housing and here is familiar with that term and what it means all right so pretty much all of you so for those of you may not be as familiar for those of you need a little refresher i just want to give you a definition of that term from all harm king county so rapidly housing is an intervention designed to help individuals and families to quickly exit homelessness and return to permanent housing rapidly housing assistance is offered without preconditions such as employment income absence of criminal record or sobriety and the resources and services provided tailored to the unique needs of the household there are three core components are rapidly housing and they include finding housing fast for an individual or family experiencing homelessness helping to pay for their housing through a subsidy and connecting those people to jobs and other services that help them retain the housing so this is become a big part of one of the recommendations that the city has been given in terms of how to address homelessness and we think because of that it just deserves a little further discussions sorry to tell us a little bit about the way that this could work in our city what the challenges are how we could address them we have our panelists and i'm going to introduce them briefly katherine lester is the director of the seattle department of human services a rapidly housing fund and policymaker we have maria williams who is the program director at life wire which provides rapid re housing and other services to domestic violence survivors and we have rachel file a u w assistant professor with the evan school of public policy and government and she researches nonprofits influence on solutions to homelessness and finally we have tamara bauman solid ground case manager working with homeless families so welcome and thank you for coming so i want to jump straight in and i'm actually going to pose the first question to all of you and see if all of you can give me a response to these as we've said rapid rehousing has become a central part of the federal response to homelessness and it's also a model that the city of seattle wants to scale up how well do you think this model is working in seattle and king county right now and let anyone who wants to go well i would say that rapidly housing is a really great solution for people who have fewer barriers and there could be a family that doesn't have an eviction on their record or criminal history or past housing debt those a seem to be the biggest barriers for folks who are in our program for the longest so i have to address that i think i think it would be problematic to view any one type of  housing model as a one size fits all solution to the problem of homelessness in seattle and king county i think it's not a technical problem but a problem that is an adaptive challenge that requires all stakeholders to mobilize towards a collective response to homelessness and in my view you can't really solve homelessness without the feedback and leadership of those who are experiencing or have experienced homelessness so i think in some ways it works great for a small population but it shouldn't be the only solution or the only intervention mine and i will i think give in true academic fashion the answer it depends and but really it depends i think on what we're comparing it to so when we talk about rapid rehousing nationally it's often in contrast to transitional housing and a lot of the research that has been done relates rapidly housing as an alternative to transitional housing which after a decade plus of research has indicated is not as helpful as people once would have thought it would be helpful so we can say that perhaps it is doing better than transitional housing we can say it's doing better than nothing right maybe leaving people on the street if we're comparing it to a longer term more permanent subsidy or permanent supportive housing then it's not doing well at all so i think the comparison group in terms of what we're trying to expect is really important to assess how it's doing and i was going to jump in you used the words transitional housing there and i'm wondering if you can just explain to people what that means so that we are what we're comparing things to share and transitional housing is these are different strategies to address homelessness and transitional housing has been around longer than rapidly housing and comes from the idea that people who are experiencing homelessness need a supportive environment for a temporary period of time usually one to two years during which they receive many services that might help enable them to then move elsewhere and live independently so usually these are residential environments that are very service rich but they're also temporary and for the context of the audience this is one of the approaches that the city has been told they should scale back in in favor of putting more resources into reparatory housings are going to continue with you maria how well do you think that rapid rehousing model is working in seattle and king county at the moment that rapid rehousing may look one way for one organization and then wildly different for another so what we've found that particularly for survivors of domestic violence which is the population that i work with is that when you have a flexible program that allows people to receive not a set amount of of months of rental subsidy but really dig into what works for them and what they need and then also pair that with flexible funds that can address some of the issues that tamar was talking about so can pay back debt can addictions can pay other barriers to housing that the family may be experiencing and couple that also with supportive case management we call it advocacy in the domestic grounds world that can really help a family  housing so hi everyone my name is katherine lester with the city of seattle i would echo a couple of things that the panel has said i think fidelity is really important so i think we're beginning the city of seattle is beginning to think about how to increase its investment in robbery housing in the upcoming year we're actually investing roughly about two million dollars in robbery housing that's going to be across about five agencies along with some support to king county and that will serve about hopefully five hundred folks households i should say not individuals i think households and individuals is a distinction that's important and you know what i would offer is that we truly cannot think of this this is a really i just came from a conversation with folks around homelessness and you know one of the things that came up in the conversation is that we often tight try to address things with kind of one size fits all and so the original comments about this being an adaptive challenge not a technical i think are really important this notion around you know kind of not black and white thinking that there's a lot of gray and so we definitely have opportunities to improve the fidelity of how we're doing rapparee housing and i think there's an opportunity for us to think about how it's one of many tools in our toolkit as we move forward so i mean stay with you for a second catherine you mentioned there one of many tools in the tool kit how does the city say this approach fitting in with the many other homeless or services that we have in the city work and it's why data matters in terms of thinking about that secondly we really want to figure out how to be person centered and so not forcing people into a particular resource but really meeting people where they are and we  also want to make sure that we are addressing racial disparities so when we look at sort of who is impacted by homelessness along with a lot of other things i think that's really important wrapper we housing is sort of one of the tools that we want to use but we recognize that we can't just kind of shift everything like the pendulum can't shift one way or another and that we still definitely need emergency shelter but we want to think about when is the best time for us to use emergency shelter because i can't imagine that any one of us would ever want to rely on that as our permanent residence and we know that sometimes people stay at emergency shelter for a very long time for a variety of reasons so raw emergency shelter you mean the shelters that people would go to to stay overnight yeah they have no other option definitely so just kind of thinking about you know i'm not a big fan of sort of all or nothing thinking i think that sort of all of the resources in appropriately tailored to people's needs is really critical you mentioned shifting money to things that work so i want to talk a little bit now about what we know about rocketry housing and how well it does work so rachel you have studied this and this is a model that's considered best practice nationwide but it's still a fairly new model as well so what does the research that we have so far tell us and how does that apply to what we might do in the city of seattle so it's definitely maria and i were talking about earlier that this is definitely a program and an approach where the practice and funding is pretty far ahead of the research so we actually  don't we're kind of just starting to catch up in terms of the research and understanding really what's happening at this point we don't even know sort of nationwide a catalogue of rapid rehousing programs and what exactly that means at an agency level so what maria was alluding to if you walk into a rapidly housing program at one agency what might they be offering each client and how might they be doing engaging with the services compared to another agency we don't know if there are sort of some emerging best practices but i put that in quotes because it's not we haven't really tested them as best practices there are more sort of emerging shared practices that people are deciding are the best ones and maybe they are maybe they aren't but we don't know yet some of the things that we know most come out of a randomized control trial study called family option study that was sponsored by hud and this had no i don't know maybe eleven sites across the country seattle was not one of those sites so we don't know anything specific about seattle from that study but it really again looked at rapidly housing compared saw that the housing assistance outperformed everything in terms of housing stability and terms of wellbeing outcomes in terms of reducing domestic violence all of these other things that we might want to get the housing voucher was far  away the best intervention rapidly housing fell along the lines of almost everything else except that it appeared to be substantially cheaper so getting mostly the same results in terms of people returning to homelessness or their housing stability but not costing as much as either emergency shelter or transitional housing with the other two alternatives i want to give our other panelists a second to chime in but i want to stick with this for just a second because the studies that have been done they measure success very differently they're different measures so i'd love to know how should we be measuring success in seattle since we do have very little information at this point if we put money into this is a city how should mean so are we talking about housing stability are we talking about avoiding shelter or are we talking about saving money i mean i think those are all different goals that might lead to different measurement different outcome measurements i think some of the things that would be really valuable to look at sort of regardless of of how we're defining success would be sort of time from walking in the door to actually securing an apartment so part of this process is that you're getting housed in the private market and you need to have a landlord and a unit you and the agencies are working really hard to make that happen we know that for some people it can take a very long time so looking at that time between ok you are an appropriate person to receive this intervention when are you securing a unit i think it's very important to know and then i think along the lines of the equity priorities that have been mentioned are we seeing differences across different types of clients in terms of who might be house more easily more quickly in the private market based on other characteristics and i think housing stability is is also extremely important so knowing if people are staying in the units that they're renting talking either with the clients or with landlords to know what are the experiences once they're actually housed a challenge of this program is that once someone is housed there's no there's no mandatory or really easy way to stay in touch with them because the idea is you've gotten back on your feet and that's one of the advantages for people who don't need a more service rich environment they can just go back to independent living that they may have been in before but it means it's pretty hard for us to know where people went if they stayed in their apartments if they moved departments if they returned to homelessness we might have some indicators but it's hard to know so tom are you working with clients put them into housing what do you what are you seeing in terms of their experiences and in a city like seattle and how difficult are people finding it to find a place once they have these assistance available it's incredibly incredibly challenging for families to access housing when there are so many market forces and conditions that might preclude someone from getting housed i don't think we can underestimate like the my macro micro level systemic barriers that really harm people harm families and so when you're asking about how do we measure success i think there's a critical piece of client voices we want to be client centered and effective but there's also a lack of client voice in determining services program design and so i as a advocate who came from the d v field i believe it's absolutely critical to center the voices of families who are impacted by domestic violence or homelessness to have the core the core leadership in determining how these programs are defined how they are set up and administered and executed to in the within the community so for a lot of people to get housed as quickly as possible a lot of them have to give up something in another life domain that might be important to them like moving away from their social support networks or giving up access or close proximity to their children's schools or to their jobs so i think  it's really it's really challenging for folks who are living in extreme or even moderate poverty then you have institutional racism and zero rent control policies that make it very difficult for anyone to be able to not just access housing but to sustain housing with their house even with the subsidy that subsidy ends and they'd haven't met all those program goals of an obtaining employment or accessing public benefits a lot of people are still left in a similar position from when they entered the program so it's a challenging maria you work with an organization that also helps people to get into housing through record housing programs i'm wondering that idea of what happens when the assistance runs out what do you find from your clients of a day is it enough time for them to be back up on their feet are they finding the assistance really does get them back to where they need to be how do they deal with that when that sort of transition comes up i think this is where supportive services are really playing a key role and in any sort of housing intervention if you have a case manager that's walking along beside you in the process and that you've built a trusting relationship with and you know that you can rely on you're far less likely to become homeless again because you can say about individual i don't know how i'm going to make next month's rent or i can make next month's rent but i need new tires for my car and i don't know how i'm going to do that and it's all these really when you when you're living on the edges of poverty all of these very small things to many people that can really push you over the edge and lead to homelessness and when you're in an open dialogue with someone that can actually reach out and can help you and has resources and can can sort of work as a resource broker for you because as a marginalized homeless individual you don't always have resources at your disposal it's far easier to obtain to maintain stable housing i think that like tamar was saying self selection into programs is essential i think that we've found that if a family really believes that short term rental assistance or rapid rehousing or whatever you want to call it because it's called the julian things in confronting can really work for you if if that's the thing that you say no that's what i need and i know that because of all these other things that have happened for me and my life i know that that's the intervention that's going to work for me but any time that you i think develop a program that has really defined restrictions around it can only be this much and it can only be this said which i agree with especially about if families identify this as the intervention that they think will work for them by the statement about that supportive services are important in ever in any housing intervention because i think actually what we know is for a lot of people it's just affordability and that's what their research has shown the study i was mentioning as well as other studies that if you can't afford where you're living then it doesn't matter if you have services or not interest maybe it doesn't matter but we actually see the improvements in physical wellbeing mental wellbeing children going to school all of these other things without adding those supportive services we get those results just from making sure that people can afford where they live catherine i'd love to address that with you because we've seen success with rapid rehousing in cities like houston new orleans salt lake city where they have a consumer rights more housing is available there's just more stock and also rents aloa so that's a different situation than we're looking at here in seattle where we are facing an affordable housing crisis how does the city want to make this model work and how can this model work in a city like these you know it's a great question so i was just thinking about  o the theme around flexibility so i think flexibility is definitely sort of access to dollars to be able to be used flexibly but flexibility is also about sort of the ability to get people indoors and so we talk a lot about housing first but the reality is that we don't often have opportunities for people to be housed first and so thinking about how we actually take advantage that one of the things that the city and the county are doing is really thinking about a remake of our landlord  program and really thinking about how do we create a greater leverage for more units to be available and recognizing that we've got to do a better job at helping folks that are practitioners be able to navigate that because often times social workers feel like they have two clients that they're working with they're working with people who they are trying to go how soon they are also working with landlords and trying to kind of manager brian have different dynamics and so one of the i think opportunities moving forward and this is not to say that it is necessarily totally easy i recognize that this particular community around our rental markets is very different than other communities and yet we are also seeing opportunities in other high rents markets to be able to be successful with rapidly housing because it's about sort of making the choice are we willing to do whatever it takes and be really flexible and creative in doing that to get people house or are we waiting for a perfect scenario by which people are indoors you brought up there the other side of this equation which is the landlords and in a market like seattle landlords have got a lot of options you know we've got people at really big companies we've got people who have  you know perfect rental histories a lot of money to spare i'd love to hear from the caseworkers how do you deal with landlords and how do you get how can we get landlords on board for a system where they do have the choice of someone else and not necessarily taking a chance on someone who has a record re housing about i've had a lot of success and kind of building relationships with landlords and they often will call me a case manager or their housing advocate if there are issues with the tenant that happens to be living in their property that has really mitigated a lot of issues for the property to rent to another one of our residents are one of our program participants so  relationship building and collaboration across sectors is critical because you're not just there for the participant you're also there for the landlord and i think that a feeling of safety and trust with them that really is just a matter of kind of schmoozing and you know developing that relationship it's critical i just want to offer i think that's a really great point and i want to offer that this is an opportunity for public sector such as the city and the county to lean in in terms of our ability to have systemic impact so a lot of times we talk about sort of our work from a service perspective which i think is as a social worker i think that's totally important but there are some real systemic barriers as to why people are outdoors and or why quite frankly why people need helping systems period and so i think there's an opportunity for the city to lean in a different way around the accountability of our system and particularly landlords and other housing options for the responsibility of this being a  community panelist that we're missing tonight is a woman who is someone who has been through the rapid rehousing process she's someone who had help from the program and i would love to hear from  perhaps you could help with this i'd love to hued the experience that people go through once they do have a voucher available to them especially if they want to stay in the city of seattle where the market is so very tight sure i can relationship that the organization has sought to build with clamor and and i really like the idea it's not ideal but it is real that you have two clients you have the person you're working with and you have a lamb aren't in all the conversations that myself and my coworkers have had with landlords what it boils down to is that they're business people and if that you treat them as business people they're far more likely to respond to you than if you come to them pleading your case we've been very fortunate that there's been a number of survivors that we've worked at who have said i'm that they want to disclose this so landlords and it happens the landlord may also have experienced family violence and and that can be something that is sort of a giving back nature but that is the small small small minority of  instances this is where we find that flexible funding really really helps that if you can offer an increased deposit to a lamb or if you can offer our first and last month's rent upfront if you can give them your business card and say if things go awry i'm a person that you can be in touch with and then as a service writer you continue to make that contact with the landlord over time that seems to really build that relationship i'm so much so that when then the landlord has other property available that often call you because they know that you can get people in quickly and as a business person that's what they're looking for so in working with my own boards and tight housing market success that we've had it sounds like a pretty heavy lift from the case manager point of view and i'd love to know what how feasible i guess if used to ramp this program up substantially with that kind of manpower needed behind and that kind of adult population and in their program they actually have a split in among the staff where they have case managers who work exclusively with the clients and then they have housing specialists who work in the their board relationships and that is the sort of many ways that this program can be implemented that's also an option for sort of splitting that workload which is something that they've sort of evolved into over time and some of it came from feeling like it was maybe too much too much of a heavy lift for the case managers to be trying to manage both and so the case managers can work with the housing specialists within their own agency instead of feeling like they have to be focused both both on the client and in the market  i also wanted to add there just related to the market we did some interviews with both case managers and housing specialists and they have sort of fascinating insight into that how you might think that advice given to clients and case managers about how to how to find a landlord in one of the things we've heard a lot was to avoid the big corporations and that the mom and pop landlords are more likely to be open to this kind of idea and the private landlords and  and i you know it's great to hear katherine talk about what the city might do you can say i think that's an area where we think about a housing market dominated by you know the corporations they might have had quarters in chicago or somewhere else they don't actually have the authority to make those decisions locally so it's not entirely the fault of the person speaking to the client but at the same time if we think about that percentage of our market that's not really available for this type of intervention and then we're trying to get more people into barriers they might have an eviction record they may have criminal histories what do you what do you want to say to landlords in seattle to get them interested in this idea of renting to a rapid rehousing program last month was in a conversation in the bay area and with a colleague and who does sort of system work arounds returned citizens otherwise known as reentry in the south and he quoted the statement that seventy five million people in this country have some sort of criminal history and that's such a staggering statistic to me it's a quarter of our country's population and so when you think about  sort of this exclusivity about who you're actually going to do business with it feels very shortsighted and so it my train of thought in your original question is you know what what are our what are our thoughts about sort of the engagement of landlords and i think they individual relationships are crucial i'm a big believer of relational capital but i not to sound repetitive but i just think that there is an opportunity similar to you may have seen in the paper sometime in the last couple of months the mayor sends a letter basically severing the relationship between the city and what copia or well sparboe sorry used to be back in the day wells fargo and it was it was a statement to say we're going to lean in around sort of  our sort of leverage as a city to make a very clear statement about who we will and won't do financial business with i guess what i'm offering and what we're talking about and thinking through is what does that look like around making units available and i think part of that is sort of the remake of how we think about our current landlord program and really thinking about what might master leasing look like or what made it look like to work with folks who are in a corporate environment that have the a bill to have real systemic impact when it comes to making units available so that's so i say i believe in the system of the service sort of one on one relational piece but i think there's also an opportunity to think really broadly about what's the system change that's needed i also just want to go back around your question around the ramp up and it's something that actually keeps me up at night a lot which is really this broader conversation about capacity and you know capacity is off and there are lots of ways to have working definitions of capacity capacity a sometimes to find purely as money the thing that keeps me up at night really is pure people capacity and you know the ability to not only recruit and retain folks who are working with communities and individuals who are such on the margin in our in our community but also in the capacity to have really strong folks that can stay in it for a long time and have fidelity to a practice and so i think you know i often give this example if if this was a transportation package that we were talking about there would become possibly around the transportation infrastructure that is needed and i think that we need kind of a human and human services infrastructure that really supports us being able to move forward and ramp up new and continue good stuff so i know that we heard obviously it's a pretty difficult market to find housing you know regardless of who you are why you're trying to find housing and one of the things that was in a report given to the city that recommended that record housing be an approach that the city puts more focus on one of the things said in this report was basically the priority has to be to get people housed and if that means that they go outside of the area that they want to live in and so be it if it means they pay more of their income than they would originally want to in rent so be it but that needs to be the priority was to get them into housing and i'd like to know from the panelists and anyone feel free to jump in to answer this what kind of impact do you think that approach truly this model could have in terms of equity and and whether or not we're sort of pushing people on a lower socio economic rung and people of color outside of city limits by taking that particular approach that's an excellent question and one that i've actually observed in my work as a journey home case manager in fact one of the participants i work with has actually been priced out of the seattle  market is now living in auburn because she couldn't afford even with her boucher a lot of her options were very limited and  is living in a sub suburb where transportation and employment resources are fewer and further between and so when we're talking about inequity and social justice  she is a woman of color she's a single parent of four children i don't see a lot of equity and social justice in a model that says we can't really prepare you for taking over the rent support people who are the most marginalized or the most vulnerable there needs to be both a legislative advocacy piece as well as participant input i just think that i am going to be the one who emphasizes that until i'm blue in the face unless you have the people who are experiencing homelessness at the forefront of the movement to end homelessness we're going to see this problem again and again and again so i guess if i was to recommend anything it would be to start including the voices of people who are accessing our services into the conversation around how do we end homelessness i guess that's what i would say rely on is what we have and if if the directive is to get people housed with this funding that we're giving you that we know is going to make all of the difference in people's lives and that's what we're going to do and we're going to put every supportive services around it that we possibly can because that's what we have control over we don't have control over affordability of market is service providers and so it leaves us what you know marginalize in a case of working with marginalized truly marginalized people that are th being pushed further and further further out from where they most identify that they want to be so i think that for service providers that it's a rock and a hard place and that you work with what you can and you do the best by the money that's given you and by wand they would say yes we want more affordability so it's not that they're not doing what they can personally i would like to see greater connection between these conversations about homelessness and various tools for affordability i think when we any sort of service providers human services space we tend to think of permanent subsidies as the only option for increasing affordability and the reality is we are in a city in a region that also is engaging in a very extensive conversation about how to adapt to these tools for affordability at a larger scale and they they tend to be different people in those conversations and they also tend to have different supporters and different  opponents so i think you know something that i answered and am frustrated in from from my corner of the world is that we have immense support for getting people indoors that support doesn't necessarily translate to what needs to be done to have a housing market that truly is excess a bull in our central city in the areas where people want to be that might be these additional options for thanks i guess the only thing i would i would add is i always like to give context to the cities and really the mayors vision and sort of path around this work and i always talk about it as kind of three things the first is the indoors is the crisis response and we spend a lot of time in the crisis and sometimes to the point of be at times from where i said destroy acted from some of the other kind of systemic movement that can happen the second is really about housing affordability and this commitment to continuing to figure out how to generate local resources and rethink what it looks like locally to make more affordability and livability real in this community and then the third is sort of what we've been talking about which are the improvements to our homeless system thinking about how to be much more person centered and investing in what works and addressing racial disparities i always sort of give those three sort of points because i think it's important none of them kind of sit alone or could sit alone and what i would just acknowledge inside of it is that i think what is a great opportunity albeit a little more challenging perhaps since the november election is to really think about what does it look like to gather to be more coalesced locally in how we talk with an advocate at the state and with the federal partners and so  because i think some of what we are attempting to do is fill in the cracks of disinvestment that has been forty years in the making and you know the affordability crisis that exists quite frankly along the west coast is a reflection of something more than what local governments can fix and solve alone would be with one thing that popped out at me with the focus strategies report was  the notion that homelessness in seattle king county isn't a matter of housing affordability it's a matter of using our resources more efficiently and i  program is there a way that we can make sure that the the implementation of this program in the city of seattle and in king county can help to address the underlying causes of why people were homeless in the first place is this a model that can help to do that and keep people in housing as opposed to perhaps just being a short term  really i would say that the underlying cause of homelessness is that you can't afford a place to live so i don't actually see the underlying causes other things i think a lot of people do have a lot of challenges but they're victims of domestic violence who are housed in people with substance abuse problems who are housed so that not having a place to live is is the underlying cause but there are certainly people who record housing tenant does help who may have maybe actually be able to maintain their housing they just had some bad luck or a health problem or got laid off from their job but our employer boy in a in a profession that might be able to pay their rent so i don't i think want to get lost in this conversation that referee housing isn't the right thing for anyone because the market so bad because the reality is we have people who are homeless who have all of the tools they need to be self sufficient and for various population what can we do for this other population for those who maybe don't have everything lined up yet quite in the place where if you give them a one time injection of funds which is often how it works to help with things like the security deposit and first or last month's rent which can be very difficult to come wait for somebody who isn't quite at the point where three to six months later they're going to be on their own two feet how can we adapt to this program to make sure that they don't relapse into know i mean a lot of the service providers and my coworkers have been concerned about the income to rent ratio and what we think or what we hope might help folk over a long period until they feel comfortable actually comfortable paying rent on their own is is looking at how can we do that system change and make our subsidies perhaps longer increase the amount of the subsidy just so that they have to the people we serve have a sense of security and taking over the rent and have the capacity and ability and the resources they need to be housing independent so i think there's some systemic issues that need to be addressed sooner than later  because affordability is such a huge issue and then you're also like playing with the idea of how can we make things more equitable for people with disabilities survivors of domestic violence mean handed over to the audience in about five minutes i would love for the panelists just to wrap up for me if you could emery i want to start with you because i we haven't heard from you in just a while i'd love to your final thoughts on this in terms of what you would like to see moving forward as the city does put more focus on to this particular tool how do you think it could be improved and how would you like to see it utilized in the city so that it is something that can help as many people as possible sure the national alliance to end homelessness has a really really great benchmarks laid out for rapid rehousing specifically and one of the things that's really risen to the top is that flexibility is the most important thing that as you are saying at times in three to six months you're not you may actually be able to take over the rounds but you're not going to be able to do it in a way that you have confidence and home and homelessness for a family is so much more than just putting a roof over their head it's increasing their confidence it's allowing them to be healthy allowing them to be safe allowing them to choose a life that they actually want to live and we're doing that putting a program on top of that that says in six months and three months and whatever amount of time we're going to be out of here and we're actually not going to check in with you and you're going to be on your own those are the things that i think have resoundingly not worked and and it's easy to fall back into that idea because it's very clear cuts and it's very specific and i i would  challenge the city and from hers to really think to think differently about it and really think flexibly really trust the folks that you're funding that they can best serve the populations that they're set up to serve and that when you do that that's when you see a reduction in home i'll bring up something that we haven't i think we haven't used the term progressive engagement yet which is very particular to this program it's the idea that the case manager does have the discretion to sort of up assistance as needed but you don't want to start at that place right you don't want to give people way more than they need because you want to be a good steward of public resource and you don't want to sort of patronize people with more services than are actually necessary so so that's one of the sort of values or strategies that's meant to be part of rapidly housing and i think even without dealing with all these market level issues i would like to see some more clarity i think in communication funders and the providers about what progressive engagement actually looks like and how a case manager is meant to what indicators should a case manager be using to say yes you are a person who could use more more services at the six month mark versus no i think that you haven't really been holding up your end of the bargain so we're we're moving on and i think that it's just communication about that is very difficult right now where we think of the environment of having say a year long contract with a certain amount of money and a certain number of people you're supposed to know those it's very hard to say well you're at the six month mark but we still need to house three more people so we're not going to ramp up during gauging and services and instead we're going to you know give some more people their first last month rent security deposit so i think something that could be improved just even within the constraints that exist is more communication about how that process should look i have with definitely like to see more collaboration between funders and providers and program participants and one of the things that that i think we can start doing now is have grew up with one of the things i'm personally working on is developing rapidly housing focused groups for program participants current informally homeless families and individuals to come and share feedback with funders service providers administrators because i think that might change the conversation a little bit if if we have input and perspective from a group that hasn't really been tapped into but are the ones that decisions are being made around i think i'd like to see a little bit more of that and maybe including homeless families into the rapid response and learning  circles yeah and even going to thinking creatively about how we can expand our partnerships with faith based communities to identify landlords and housing leads which i think the prioritized so when i was thinking about today's conversation there were three things that really kind of resonate with me as i was kind of reflecting one is that i think data matters and i'm a big believer people have heard me say that i don't believe any data is really conclusive totally and yet it's a critical barometer in kind of understanding where you're starting where you want to get to and the stories are part of the data so i think sometimes we think about data is just kind of widgets that we count which actually kind of drives me crazy because we just don't really tell us anything they tell us something but not a lot so i think data matters to having a culture of learning and where we're learning about what makes real impact for real people the second thing that i was reflecting on is and you've heard me say this is that capacity matters and that the ability to have the right capacity to do what we're trying to do well and paying attention to how we do our work and do it well so i think rachael you said you know we've got lots of different rapparee housing programs happening but they don't all operate the same way and i've been using the example of fast food like they all have a mcdonald's on the front but back doors there's like once a mcdonald's once a taco bell went to burger king they're kind of and that's not to be disparaging at all it's just to say that they're slightly different ways they're all kind of they look the same on the outside but they're slightly different on the inside so capacity matters and then i would say the third thing which has been echoed is that equity matters and particularly for me i talk about this as a woman of color you know equity matters and that it's important to lead with race because when we look at who is impacted not only by homelessness but by every other kind of quote helping system disproportionality disparities around race are pretty shocking and they feel even more shocking in a community like this that is diverse but it's also increasingly