Pierce County Youth and Young Adult Active Homelessness Deep Dive
Above is Pierce's run chart for the number of young people actively experiencing unaccompanied homelessness over time.
Tammy Riles with A Way Home Washington located in Pierce County
Problem / goal
The problem we noticed was the number of young people experiencing homelessness was abnormally high with no reduction over a long period of time which made us question whether the data was accurate. Sometimes an issue in the community’s logic flow can cause inaccuracies in counting young people on the active list.
The goal of this deep dive was to look at each project in the community and break down their data to account for every individual. We wanted to find out if the young people were actually experiencing homelessness, how they were being served and how long they were active in the system.
Solution / Steps taken
The first step was to break down the data. We used the YYA By Name List data set from Pierce’s HMIS system and Tableau to break down the data by multiple factors:
First date of open enrollment
Project
Active by provider and date
Outflow by provider
Coordinated Entry Projects and enrollments
Findings:
Issue with inactivity: There were over 50 clients that were still active in the system and had not been contacted since as far back as 2019. This showed that young people entered into the system in 2019 and never exited. This issue was also present in the Coordinated Entry data
Prevention project: There were a large number of individuals on the “Active Homeless list” that were enrolled into a prevention project. In prevention projects individuals are at risk of becoming homeless but not currently experiencing homelessness. As important as knowing each of these youth serving them in the system, they should not be included on the “ Active Homeless list” since they are not currently homeless.
Solutions
Inactivity:
The inactivity policy and logic were not working properly, leaving many young people on the list for over 90 days even though they were no longer active. This is a two step issue highlighting a data entry issue and a logic issue. The logic in the report was not automatically moving inactive clients to inactivity after 90 days.
To address the logic issue, the data lead will rewrite the inactivity logic calculations in the report to fix the error.
To address the data entry issues , we will be holding an in person data entry and literacy session for all data specialists in the community to refresh and discuss the importance of clean and accurate data.
Prevention project:
The purpose of prevention projects is to prevent young people from experiencing homelessness who are at risk. So the issue we identified was that counting them in the “Active Homelessness” numbers is a misrepresentation of the actual number of youth experiencing homelessness because they are not yet homeless. Pierce was the only Anchor Community including prevention projects in their active number.
To address this issue, first we met with the community to discuss this and let the community decide if they wanted to continue to count this part of the population within the active numbers. After meeting with the community they all agreed that they wanted these young people to remain on the BNL to case conference but remove them from the monthly active counts.
Once again working with the data lead Geoff Campion , taking the community decision into account, the community filtered the prevention projects out of the active counts but left them on the BNL report. This allows the community to track and account for at risk youth but not count them in the active numbers.