As the Lead Agency for the Brevard Continuum of Care (CoC), we are responsible for submitting four key reports to HUD every year – the Point-in-Time Count, Housing Inventory Count, Longitudinal Systems Analysis, and our Systems Performance Measures. A description of each is below. Together, these reports provide an overview of how our homeless system of care is functioning.
PIT counts are a critical source of data on the number and characteristics of people who are homeless in the United States. These data are used to measure homelessness on a local and national level and are published annually on the HUD Exchange. HUD defines a PIT Count as “a count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons carried out on one night in the last 10 calendar days of January.” While HUD mandates an unsheltered PIT count is conducted every 2 years, in Brevard, we conduct the count every year.
The HIC is a point-in-time inventory of projects within a CoC that provide beds and units dedicated to serving persons who are homeless. The project types that participate in the HIC are Emergency Shelter, Transitional Housing, Rapid Rehousing, and Permanent Supportive Housing.
A critical aspect of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, as amended, is a focus on viewing the local homeless response as a coordinated system of homeless assistance options as opposed to homeless assistance programs and funding sources that operate independently in a community. The LSA report, produced from a CoC’s Homelessness Management Information System (HMIS) database provides HUD and CoCs with critical information about how people experiencing homelessness use their system of care. To view more information about the LSA, please visit HUD Exchange.
HUD has established a set of selection criteria to use in awarding CoC funding that requires CoCs to report to HUD their system-level performance. The intent of these selection criteria is to encourage CoCs, in coordination with Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) Program recipients and all other homeless assistance stakeholders in the community, to regularly measure their progress in meeting the needs of people experiencing homelessness in their community and to report this progress to HUD.
CoCs also play an integral role in jurisdictions’ Consolidated Plan planning process. They are required to provide the jurisdiction with the information necessary to complete the Con Plan(s) for homeless assistance provided to persons within the CoC’s geographic area that fall within the Con
Plan jurisdiction’s geographic area, including data on performance measures. HUD and the Brevard CoC use the SPMs as a competitive element in its annual CoC Program Competition and gauge the state of the homeless response system nationally. The SPMs below are reported out as part of our strategic plan: Housed & Healthy Brevard.
We also collect other key measures such as:
· Active # of participants
· Total # of households served
· # of case management hours by partner agencies
· Total # of combined services provided by partner agencies (supportive and financial)
· # of people who spent at least 1 night in a shelter program
Currently we have 33 partner agencies documenting in HMIS.