Santa Cruz County Coordinated Entry System
Overview
Santa Cruz County’s Housing for Health Partnership defines Coordinated Entry as the approach to coordinate and manage the system’s housing, participating shelter and supportive services resources to enable providers to make equitable decisions to best connect people experiencing homelessness to interventions to end their homelessness based on available information and resources. The Coordinated Entry process seeks to ensure that people experiencing homelessness have fair and equitable access to the set of resources and services for which they are eligible, regardless of where they present for assistance, and that resources designed for households with the highest service and housing needs are targeted to those who need them most. The process recognizes that housing resources and services are limited. Housing for Health Partnership (H4HP) Connectors, designated people specifically trained in this process, work to provide as many people as possible experiencing homelessness with support, connection to services, and problem solving partnership with the goal of resolving homelessness.
The Coordinated Entry system refers to the whole of the public, private, and non-profit agencies and programs that participate in Coordinated Entry. The lead entity for the Continuum of Care (CoC) implementation of the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) is the County of Santa Cruz Human Services Department Housing for Health Division (H4H) and the system is administered by Bitfocus. Bitfocus has been designated by the H4H Policy Board to operate HMIS, ensuring that the Coordinated Entry System has access to HMIS software and functionality for the collection, management, and analysis of data on persons served by coordinated entry. HMIS is the data system that is used for all Coordinated Entry activities including, enrollment, Housing Needs Assessments and housing action planning, prioritization, queue management, and matching.
For additional information about Santa Cruz County’s Coordinated Entry System, please visit the Housing for Health Partnership’s website https://homelessactionpartnership.org/. Agencies interested in providing Connector Services can contact Housing for Health Manager, Monica Lippi – Monica.Lippi@SantaCruzCountyca.gov for more information.
For Connectors:
