Disclaimer: The content below contains information maintained by the collaborative. It has not been reviewed or endorsed by HUD.
Homelessness is not isolated to a single city or county, and the counties in the San Francisco Bay Area are now developing a regional approach to understanding the root causes and best practices for ending homelessness. The group (known as the Bay Area Counties Homeless Information Collaborative, or "BACHIC"), is implementing regional coordination of HMIS efforts designing and piloting a regional data warehouse to aggregate data from each county in BACHIC.
BACHIC includes the following counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Monterey, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Napa, Marin, San Francisco, Solano, and Sonoma.
Coordinating efforts across the broader region will result in an HMIS system(s) that better serves the needs of all the constituencies involved. Among the primary advantages of working at a regional level are:
· The ability to bring together a consolidated, non-duplicated picture of homelessness across the region in order to better understand the dynamics and migration patterns of the homeless population and how this affects individual communities and agencies within the region.
· The ability to leverage learning and expertise across the multiple communities, increasing the overall likelihood of project success and decreasing the corresponding risks and uncertainties.
· The ability to leverage investments across multiple communities, reducing the overall cost and reducing the overall time to implement an HMIS solution.
· The ability to identify instances of chronic homelessness which cross county boundaries thereby enabling service agencies to offer and provide more appropriate services to the effected homeless population.
· The ability to provide funders of homeless service agencies a better regional picture of the effectiveness of the programs they sponsor and the ability to better target their investments with the homeless population.
The Regional Homeless Information Network (RHINo) is a project of BACHIC whose vision is to obtain a better understanding of the homeless population in the region, as a whole. Designed to leverage data already being collected by each continuum's homeless management information system (HMIS) in accordance with the Department of Housing and Urban Development's directive, RHINO will serve as a regional data warehouse that will be utilized to analyze trends, gaps in services, and mobility patterns of the homeless population, as well as to inform policy makers and funders. Analysis of regional data will allow for better planning and resource management and an increased ability to address the present and future needs of the homeless.
Community Technology Alliance's extensive experience in consulting on regional, collaborative projects using database-driven technology led the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation to fund the planning phase of the RHINO project and entrusted Community Technology Alliance with leading the collaborative, and designing the project.
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, under a sub-contract with Lockheed Martin Corporation, has contracted with Community Technology Alliance to implement the project and use the lessons learned as a "Best Practice" model for other communities throughout the country.
Bay Area Peer to Peer Documentation.
Three Best Practice White Papers will shortly be produced and published on the HMIS.info website documenting: (i) The process of collaboration and planning, (ii) How the project was implemented and (iii) The policies and procedures put into place to ensure success.