letter of interest response to all home technical...
TRANSCRIPT
Letter of Interest Response to All Home Technical Assistance Announcement
August 2017
Brief description of your organization, firm or business
Julie McFarland Consulting is a sole proprietorship owned by Julie McFarland that supports communities in
building efficient and effective homeless service systems. Julie began contracting nationally in June 2017
after working for nearly a decade as a housing provider and providing technical assistance to communities
through the Consulting and Training team at CSH for three years. Current projects are focused on building
and/or enhancing coordinated entry (CE) systems within frontier, rural, and urban communities, and
supporting communities to align with best and emerging practices that move the needle on homelessness.
Just Consulting, LLC is a sole proprietorship owned by Matthew Price that offers grant management
expertise, and experience in youth development programming. Since 2012, Matthew Price has managed
federal national intermediary youth mentoring grants from the DOJ (Department of Justice) totaling $5MM
and provided training and technical assistance to 44 sub-grantees.
Your interest in participating in the system transformation efforts underway in Seattle/King County
Between 2009-2015, Julie was a housing provider in King County, overseeing programs including outreach,
employment, emergency shelter, transitional housing, rapid re-housing and permanent supportive housing
programs for families and young adults. Julie also led the team charged with launching and operating CE for
families and young adults. As a former housing provider and current technical assistance provider in King
County, Julie has tremendous interest in seeing our community reduce our inflow of new people entering the
homeless system, increase our permanent housing (PH) rate, and greatly reduce the community queue of
people experiencing homelessness across the county by supporting safe, PH connections. While there is
much work to do to obtain our ultimate goal of making homelessness rare, brief and one time, there are many
opportunities to improve our system for people experiencing homelessness, including support for housing
providers who are doing this work on the ground. It is common for providers to be asked to do more with
less. In particular, King County is focused on improving our system for the most vulnerable people in our
community, living in shelters and places that are not meant for human habitation. This shift places additional
challenges and stress on providers. Between local experience as a provider, national technical assistance
experience, knowledge of best and emerging practices, community examples and connections to providers
who are moving the needle, this opportunity to support providers through major systems change is a great fit.
Julie and Matthew are responding to this opportunity in partnership because both believe this work presents
unique challenges and receiving support from two people with diverse experience and expertise is more
effective than one person with one perspective. Julie’s experience is rooted in homeless system work and
Matthew offers a perspective on performance measurement and change management from other systems that
homeless providers can learn from and replicate.
Summary of relevant expertise: trends in homeless housing efforts, homeless housing operations, non-
profit management, data analysis
Detail regarding Julie’s experience is embedded within several questions. Julie led a team through significant
system transformation, as the lead entity for CE, experiencing zero staff turnover in the initial 1.5 years of
CE implementation and maintaining strong community relationships.
As a technical assistance provider for over 20 communities in the last three years, the focus of support has
mirrored what the Seattle/King County Continuum of Care is aiming to address:
Increased rates of participant exits to PH through appropriate matching processes (the right
intervention for the right person) and strong services that support sustained housing
Reduced lengths of stay of program participants where appropriate (ex: emergency shelter)
Reduced rates of returns to homelessness after program participants have exited the project
through provision of strong supportive services and landlord relationships
Increased occupancy through CE process, efficient intake processes, and few project level barriers
Increased proportion of people entering the project from homelessness by focusing on the most
vulnerable people living in places not meant for human habitation and emergency shelter
Matthew recently completed his Master’s degree in Nonprofit Leadership from Seattle University. For his
Practicum project, Matthew designed and implemented a diversity, equity, and inclusion audit (document
review, staff survey, data analysis (Qualtrics), and written recommendations) of a local nonprofit. Matthew
researched, interviewed, and wrote his Capstone project on barriers that boards experience when creating a
racially inclusive nonprofit environment.
As grant manager, Matthew used data inputted by subgrantees and collected by a third party (Search
Institute) to assess the impact of youth mentoring. Matthew analyzed the increase of developmental assets in
youth and parsed data by duration of match, race, and population youth (refugee, parenting/pregnant, urban,
etc.) During the current grant, we will analyze the impact of the trauma-informed mentoring model by
comparing both the average asset increase per youth between grant periods at specific organizations and
using qualitative data from mentor survey responses.
Summary of expertise and experience in practices that promote racial equity
As a Caucasian woman, Julie is aware of the privilege and opportunity she has experienced based on her race
throughout her life. She grew up in rural Montana, where about 8% of the population is Native American and
nearly 90% is white. While she participated in many courses, trainings and cultural events, it was not until
CE was launched in King County that Julie became hyper aware of widespread, institutional injustices in
housing and shifted her role to be an active participant in race and social justice efforts.
Julie currently engaged in a project with King County’s Coordinated Entry and Assessment (CEA) team in
which referral and case conferencing practices are being analyzed. Julie has participated in multiple
conversations in which racial inequity issues arise and is discussing methodology to track these issues and
develop recommendations for a public dashboard that would be reviewed during weekly case conferencing
meetings with key homeless system providers and funders, in addition to a deeper data dive monthly to
analyze trends, improvements and ongoing challenges and racial inequities. Specific to equal access issues,
there is a need to improve housing access for people of color and that includes collecting and analyzing data
on who completes assessments with staff from culturally specific organizations (ex: Chief Seattle Club, El
Centro de la Raza) and their responses to interest in culturally specific service questions (ex: Are you
interested in services tailored to people identifying as Native American?) compared to answers provided at
non-culturally specific entities like Regional Access Points. The assumption is that people completing
assessments with culturally specific organizations are expressing interest in culturally specific services more
frequently than at non-culturally specific access points, which may limit service access to non-culturally
specific options because people must opt in to be considered for specialized services. Therefore, there may
be a disparity when people access our homeless system at non-culturally specific access points and we need
to develop and implement a response to that disparity to address equal access and assessor training, leading
to consistency in culturally specific responses regardless of where people access the system.
Matthew is aware of his privilege as a Caucasian male. Specifically to racial justice, the social justice
curriculum of the MNPL program at Seattle University and the 2-day Undoing Institutional Racism by the
People’s Institute how I perpetuate systemic racism and my role in undoing systemic racism. Furthermore, I
began to put this understanding into practice through the practicum and capstone projects of my Master’s
degree. While I would never characterize myself as an expert in the field, I feel confident asking questions of
leaders about how their organizational design perpetuates injustices including those they espouse to
ameliorate.