A new project funded by Tallahassee’s Children’s Services Council aims to help families get, and stay in, stable housing by increasing access to wrap-around services at the HOPE Shelter.
The CSC will pay for a transition coordinator to provide trauma-informed care at the local HOPE Shelter for one year. The coordinator’s job will involve providing wrap-around services that will follow families after they leave the shelter to help them stay in a stable housing situation.
Holly McPhail, the CSC’s director of special projects, says many local shelters wrap services around families before they transition out of care, and then keep tabs on the families—providing something of a social services safety net. But that’s not something HOPE emergency shelter has historically done. She says the new coordinator will help with that.
“According to our needs assessment, there is a risk factor associated with families that have young children that if they exit out of care, the homeless situation, that they’re more at risk in the first 12 months of exiting out of that care," she said. "And what are the supports available to ensure -- for lack of a better word -- that they don’t have an episode of recidivism into experiencing homelessness?”
CSC Treasurer Paul Mitchell, an appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis, says he supports spending the $163,000 for the pilot.
“Every moment that we wait is a moment that we’re going to kick ourselves in the pants," Mitchell said. "There are a lot of difficulties that people go through, but a child without a home [long pause] that just, I am super-sensitive. A hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars, by the way, we have in our current funds.”
CSC Vice Chair Terrence Watts, the council’s delegate from the Florida Department of Children and Families, says he thinks there could be future sources of funding to achieve the same goal, but says the pilot is worth a try for a year.
“Just in my own capacity," Watts said, "I know that there are significant, reliable partners in this community that would show up to fulfill some of these needs that are mentioned in this pilot that I just think there’s ability for, if we choose this, to be more impactful.”
According to Family Promise, 60 percent of the families at the HOPE Shelter have children age 5 and younger.
