Focus on shelter
Hold Diversion Conversation drop in at all the shelters/day centers at some point during the month and publicize it widely!
Try getting a team to have a diversion conversation with EVERYONE in shelter.
Reach out to DV and women shelters directly to share CDF funding info at a staff meeting - For safety, a lot of those shelters don't go to a lot of community meetings and miss out on great information.
Bold ideas to remove rental barriers
You have no cap, let’s get creative!
Offer to pay a double deposit.
Offer to pay 2 months of rent up front.
Look outside of the city for a rental and pair that with getting a cheap car for a young person to continue getting to work.
Talk about diversion in case conferencing!
Add a column in your BNL case conferencing list of ‘date of last diversion conversation’ - make sure everyone has had one, and that it was recent!
If they haven’t, or it has been a while, create action steps for outreach staff to do diversion conversations with people.
Outreach Tricks
Share the new and improved CDF Eligibility flyer with your entire staff!
Scour the local go fund me requests for people that seem eligible and reach out to them with info on the CDF!
Go into the CDF dashboard and filter by your community - use the Who is missing? Where is missing? Method to analyze equity disparities in who diversion is reaching, and identify a few action steps to reach out to those populations locally.
Ask a McKinney-Vento Liaison to check in with their entire list of unaccompanied homeless students on their current housing situation before the end of the school year, and have them connect unstably housed students to CDF, if appropriate.
Increase self referrals
Don’t keep the CDF a secret!