In January 2022, AWHWA updated the Youth and Young Adult By Name List Scorecard to add additional questions around improving demographic data collection, with a specific emphasis on sexual orientation data. Since then, both Balance of State (BoS) and non-Balance of State continuums of care have been testing the new questions and have learned a lot in the process. Completion of all mandatory questions on the Scorecard is required in order to certify a community’s By Name List as quality and to transition to the next stage of the Anchor Community Initiative pipeline. This next phase is called the “reducing” phase, which is where communities use their quality, real-time By Name Lists to reduce the number of young people in their community experiencing unaccompanied homelessness down to functional zero.
Question 13 was added to the Scorecard to ensure that communities had completed key system changes that increased the quality of their sexual orientation data before moving onto the reducing phase of the Initiative. The question as it was originally written required communities to know the sexual orientation of at least 70-90% of the households on their active BNL on a month by month basis.
In keeping with the original spirit of the question, but making this question more achievable in a more reasonable time frame, Question 13 is being modified to the following:
Have you completed key system changes that will enable you to collect demographic data for at least 70% of young people on your By-name list on a month by month basis?
Communities can be certified with a quality, reliable, real-time BNL if they don’t meet the 70% completeness threshold only if they meet every item on the following checklist:
Project level deep dive on demographic data has been completed, and action is being taken by the Improvement Team and/or Data Workgroup to improve quality at a project/program level.
Sexual orientation question is added as a compulsory field in all HMIS projects (non-BoS) or sexual orientation is included in assessments at the program level (BoS).
BoS communities add sexual orientation questions as compulsory at Coordinated Entry.
The provider(s) who serve the most young people in the community are on board with asking clients their sexual orientation at intake and have implemented the infrastructure, training, and any other internal processes to make this happen.
Sexual orientation knowns at inflow have increased pre/post implementation of mandatory field in HMIS (measured by household).
Data workgroup is in place to continue monitoring demographic data quality and testing system improvements to reach the 70% threshold.
Training on collecting SOGI data is completed with local providers and there is a plan for consistent follow up training.