Month/Year of Graduation

5-2022

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

Department

Social Work

First Advisor

Aaron Banman

Abstract

In recent months, the Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) program at Heartland Family Service (HFS) has seen substantial delays during their intake process, specifically when it comes to verifying a client’s HUD-required homeless history. This has led to an increase in program vacancies, fewer clients served, and an underutilization of the program’s budget, which could also induce more permanent defunding in the future. While the agency is working to address this problem by retraining all of their case managers on how to collect homeless histories, this project seeks to instead identify and address the problem through the case managers’ perspective. Through a survey of Heartland’s housing case managers (n=20), it was determined that the biggest barrier to completing accurate homeless histories was not a lack of understanding from the case managers but a result of the process for acquiring the histories, as well as the clients’ lack of memory regarding their own whereabouts. As a result, this project proposes three alternative ways to address this problem- include the use of a visual aid in the collection process, recommunicate current policy and establish new standards for preparing information beforehand, and move the collection of homeless histories from intake to another meeting for programs that do not require it for eligibility purposes.

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