Commerce City Sentinel Express 3
October 12, 2021
Software speeds work to get homeless into shelters BY BELEN WARD BWARD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
An effort to quickly pair homeless people with open rooms in Adams County during cold weather will get a boost from a trio of software developers and a national software effort. Adams County relies on a Severe Weather Action Plan (SWAP) to help people that are homeless and living in severe weather conditions from getting hypothermia and freezing to death. That program relied on a manual and paper-based process. Code for America Community Fellows Fiona Tang, Ben Poon, and Brandon Johnson began working on an app to streamline that process a year ago. Code of America is a technology company that helps governments streamline manual processes. SWAP is funded and operated by Adams County. Several municipalities and agencies also participate in the program, including Brighton’s Almost Home. The SWAP program provides vouchers to the homeless to get them into hotels during cold winter conditions. SWAP works with a network of hotels that provide rooms for the homeless and then sends that information to agencies like Almost Home, including room availability at different locations. Adams County also works with street outreach teams that go out on foot to find and meet homeless people, conducting mobile shower and laundry events. They also post flyers with locations of shelters and soup kitchens, urging them to go to the Brighton and Thornton Anythink libraries to receive the hotel vouchers. Community Fellow Fiona Tang said members of the team joined those outreach efforts to find out what homeless individuals needed and how those services could help them. “It was a much more informed perspective on what it means to, for example, live on food stamps, or being homeless,” Tang said. But the fellows saw how slow the manual process could be, she said. “Almost Home, a communitybased organization was performing intake with people experiencing homelessness to get them into hotel rooms,” Tang said. “During one of our outreach visits, we observed clients fill out forms manually and we observed caseworkers painstakingly copy these intake responses into a spreadsheet, only to later manually enter them into the Homelessness Management Information System. We thought that this was a ripe opportunity to streamline a process that didn’t need to be so time-intensive and cumbersome.” The result is the team’s SWAP app or SWAPP. Community Fellow Ben Poon said it also helps agencies prepare. “Another addition that was in place before we came along, we added and created a no-reply text line where messages are broadcasted out to people who are subscribers,” Poon added. Since SWAP started Poon said the program issued 1,754 vouchers during the 2020-2021 cold weather season to 931 individu-
als experiencing homelessness. That amounted to roughly 8,300 nights of unsheltered homelessness, a fifteenfold increase from the previous year, Poon said. “The Swap-app enables other human service agencies in the county to participate in distributing vouchers. We helped equip caseworkers and street outreach teams from multiple municipalities including Brighton, Thornton, and Westminster. The city of Bennett had also expressed interest in coming on to the platform” said Poon. Streamlining the process with SWAPP Before the new app, the process to locate hotels for people took an average of 11-12 minutes. After SWAPP, that process was reduced to two minutes. “I’m especially proud of this because it represents a significant improvement on client and caseworkers’ experience when interacting with the SWAP program. Instead of transferring intake information from paper forms to a spreadsheet to the Homelessness Management Information System, our app helped to eliminate the data entry step to the spreadsheet, while also increasing data accuracy and reducing caseworker frustration,” said Poon. Almost Home’s manual process of paperwork, invoicing and reimbursement was eliminated with the new app. “For example, before SWAPP, hotels sometimes got away with charging Almost Home for nights
un-stayed, but with the accurate data provided through the app, Almost Home could dispute invalid charges,” said Poon. Data Accuracy A side benefit for Almost Home upgrading to the app is the accuracy of the data, Poon said. “SWAPP became the most reliable and comprehensive source of data for chronic homelessness in all of Adams County, especially given the cancellation of the 2021 point-in-time (PIT) count due to Covid-19,” he said. It’s also been useful in other areas, Poon said. “Our stakeholders had so much confidence in our app that they relied on it for non-SWAP-related service delivery,” he said. “The county & Almost Home used our SWAP data to identify ‘off the grid’ clients in otherwise unknown jurisdictions, identify veteran clients eligible for VA-housing benefits, and run an adhoc Covid-19 vaccination clinic “It feels great to know when working on software, you are working on digital so there is no tangible thing to touch, but what is cool because it is a digital product that is getting people into a safe housing that need it. It’s extremely gratifying,” he said. “It feels like the tech exists and we just need folks to bridge the gap between technology that does exist and can help people and like these issues that are on the ground. It feels really good to bridge the gap,” said Tang.
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