Anchor Communities are working hard to address homelessness amongst the COVID-19 pandemic. Those that use the ACI Core Team meetings as a space to plan and strategize around their response are benefiting from coordinating their efforts.
Check out how communities are transforming ACI meetings during this time so that they can improve their response to systems disruptions:
Spokane
Spokane wanted to be more intentional about coming up with improvement projects around recruiting for their YAB. Due to COVID-19 normal recruitment strategies were not working and attendance has been lower than usual. To address this, Spokane set a goal of 10 young people at their next YAB meeting through the following action steps:
1. Create informational materials
The Spokane team began creating a flyer and talking points for Core Team members to talk about what the YAB is.
2. Improve outreach for the Spokane YAB
Several people volunteered to reach out directly to 1-3 young people they know about the YAB
3. Maximize YAB participation
Spokane will do some research centered on identifying what, if any technological barriers are keeping young people from attending YAB meetings. The next meeting is for the first week of May.
Walla Walla
Walla Walla used their space to address all the reasons why youth and young adults were not self-referring to under-18 shelter beds at The Loft during the COVID-19 crisis. Below is list of reasons they identified that speak to why youth and young adults are not accessing shelter beds and what the communities proposed solutions are:
1. Do people know that services are available?
Core team members thought that one reason self-referrals had dropped off was that a lot of young people likely didn’t know what services were open during the stay at home order. To tackle this issue the team set out to create an online version of the flier for the youth engagement team. Core team members committed to send out electronically via email and advertise broadly, including in schools, and via social media blast.
2. Young people thought that the schedule was too rigid
With COVID-19 and the shelter-in-place order, The Loft staff had to implement more safety-related rules and more secure schedules, which felt restrictive for some of the young people accessing services. The core team identified that morning conversations with young people staying at The Loft's overnight shelter to talk about and adjust the daily schedule could feel more empowering for clients.
3. Youth and Young Adults accessing services elsewhere
Calling youth and young adults who have previously accessed services at the Loft to do check-ins, follow-ups, as well as articulate the current available resources and services.
As a result of these actions YYA stayed longer and accessed more resources after morning conversations with The Loft Staff. DCYF began to increase its rate of referrals to shelter after the youth engagement team began sending out the online version of the flier.