Sonoma County homeless service providers criticize ‘confusing’ and ‘disappointing’ funding process

For years, a collaboration of Sonoma County governments, nonprofits and other organizations has struggled to marshal a cohesive effort to tackle homelessness, one of the region’s most expensive — and contentious — public concerns.

The Sonoma County Continuum of Care umbrella organization has been beset by criticism, including in a 2020 civil grand jury report, for mismanagement, and for being unwieldy and ineffectual. It has gone through at least four reorganizations since 2018, in one instance prompted by a finding that it had been illegitimately structured.

The Continuum of Care, or CoC, is federally mandated in regions that get federal homelessness funding and is supposed to coordinate and manage local homelessness policy, programs and funding streams.

Now, discord has erupted over a new committee set up to allocate millions of dollars for homeless services, even as the broader organization struggles to chart a new course.

Board members, committee members and service providers alike attribute the turmoil in part to the fact that the organization has continually had to reinvent itself.

“It's a new Continuum of Care board. It's set up differently than the last one. It has committees. There's different moving pieces and tentacles that didn't exist before,” said Margaret Sluyk, CEO of Reach for Home, a Healdsburg-based nonprofit homeless services provider.

The challenges crystallized during recent deliberations by the continuum’s new funding and evaluation committee as it sought to recommend which projects should get some of $6.7 million in homeless service funds next fiscal year. The continuum’s board is to consider the committee’s recommendations on Wednesday.

Just about nobody was pleased with how it went so far.

“It was a bad process. It was a perfect storm,” said Sluyk, who not only leads a nonprofit that applied for funds, but is also a member of the 17-member continuum board with a seat on its funding committee. “At every step there was some sort of big issue.” (She was not allowed to discuss or vote on the recommendations because Reach for Home had applied for funds.)

On Friday, service providers who had applied for funds emailed the board saying the process was “disorganized, lacked the information necessary to make important funding decisions and overall was disappointing.”

The letter, signed “Sonoma County Service Providers,” can hardly be dismissed as sour grapes. It was sent by Sluyk, whose nonprofit was recommended for $73,000 more in funding than it received this year.

In all, 17 service providers submitted 38 projects for next fiscal year’s funding. The committee recommendations include renovations at the county’s largest homeless shelter, street outreach to homeless youth, rapid-rehousing programs that give short- and long-term rental assistance and case management to people who are homeless, and a safe house for homeless victims of domestic violence.

The committee left about $575,000 unallocated, recommending, on a 3-2 vote, that it be used to fund permanent supportive housing and prevention programs.

Providers and committee members said the entire process was too long and too rushed — with complicated spreadsheets being continually revised and distributed at the last minute. They also complained that funding priorities were unexpectedly shifted, and that some providers didn’t get a chance to make their case to the committee while others were able to speak during public comment periods.

‘Dysfunctional’

During a May 3 meeting of the committee, its acting chairperson, Una Glass, a former Sebastopol mayor, called the process “dysfunctional.”

“I would hardly disagree with you on that point,” said another committee member, Don Schwartz, Rohnert Park’s assistant city manager.

Their agreement was noteworthy.

Schwartz had pushed the committee in a direction Glass generally opposed: to immediately shift the emphasis away from county staff’s recommendations and toward permanent supportive housing and homelessness prevention proposals. That shift was not adequately communicated, some providers and committee members said.

The funding and evaluation committee was created last August to assess and recommend projects for funding. It met four times from April 19 to May 11.

Schwartz, a CoC board member as well as a funding committee member, told The Press Democrat that his aim this year was to align the funding recommendations with the CoC-designed five-year strategic plan to end homelessness, which county supervisors adopted earlier this year. The plan called for a focus on prevention and permanent supportive housing to tackle chronic homelessness that soared locally during the pandemic.

“We cannot wait a year to shift how we spend our money,” Schwartz said. “The public deserves better, we all deserve better, and this is a way to start doing that now.”

He added: “I’m sorry the process has been as problematic as it was but I don’t think that’s enough of a reason to not do the right thing, at least on a modest scale, when we have the opportunity.”

But others said the ground rules changed without notice, making the process confusing, unfair, and more difficult to navigate.

“People applied and now the process is being changed in the middle of the stream and I just don’t think that’s the right way to build a good relationship with our nonprofit partners,” said Glass, who is also a CoC board member. “In the long run, we need to do what Don’s saying, but we’re not ready for prime time yet. We need to thoroughly plan for change to ensure continuity of homeless services and avoid unnecessary turmoil.”

Different interpretations

Teddie Pierce, a Sonoma County consultant in homeless management information systems who works with continuums of care statewide, chairs the funding committee. She said instructions for applying for funds asked applicants to check a box to indicate whether their proposals aligned with the strategic plan.

But, she said, the instructions failed to clarify what that meant, “so it was being interpreted differently by different providers.” Pierce was also not allowed to discuss or vote on funding because of potential conflicts.

Schwartz said he was following the lead of the full CoC board, which in April, at his urging, instructed the committee to, among other things, “explore creating a pot of money for prevention“ and ”explore expanding (permanent supportive housing) capacity.“

“The key word is explore,” said Glass, a retired nonprofit executive and tech entrepreneur. She said in an interview that she agreed with the overall goal of aligning funding recommendations with the homelessness strategic plan.

But she said the plan is too vague, and lacks details about how to fund or implement it, and it’s not yet practical to try and match project funding to it. The committee also lacked accurate comprehensive data to base its decisions on, she said.

‘Unintended consequences’

Among the complaints outlined in the letter from service providers:

• The committee’s evaluations did not align with the application that accompanied the formal notice that funding was available. “Whatever you put out there, and including what the process for selection is, that needs to be followed,“ said Pierce. ”Nothing was ever updated to the providers. It just grew out from all the discussions (among committee members) at all these meetings.“

• Members of the committee did not have enough knowledge to make the decisions they were charged with making and some were not vetted for knowledge and understanding of homeless services.

• Some members of the committee made unannounced site visits to some providers and not to others, creating an unfair playing field for applicants.

Just five of 13 committee members took part in the recommendations; the others, like Pierce and Sluyk, were recused to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Two of the five joined the committee midway through the process.

“You know, for this amount of money for this level of importance. They're all smart people, but I think it’s a bit of an imbalance expecting five people only to make these decisions,” said Tim Miller, executive director of West County Community Services.

Miller said if the committee’s recommendations are followed, the nonprofit may have to shut down its Guerneville shelter, which provides 24/7 shelter to 35 people and support services to guide them into housing.

The final committee vote on the recommendations, on May 11, was split 3-2. Voting against them were Glass and Rebekah Sammet, a member of the Lived Experience Advisory and Planning Board, a group of people who have experienced homelessness.

‘Among the blind’

Schwartz was joined in approving the recommendations by the two newest committee members. One of them, John Baxter, a former health care executive, said at the May 3 meeting, according to a meeting transcript: “As they say, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king, and I'm among the blind.”

Baxter, who joined the committee April 27, also said at the May 3 meeting: “I find myself, probably because I'm coming in mid-process, totally ill-prepared to make recommendations to fund anything,” He added: “I would much rather rely on all of you, one-eyed men who might complain about this process, but know it much better than I do.”

A week later, on May 11, Baxter voted with Schwartz and the other new committee member, Wendell Coleman, also a member of the Lived Experience Advisory and Planning Board, to approve the final recommendations to the board.

Baxter did not respond to a request for comment.

For his part, Coleman, at the May 3 meeting, said: “I know, for myself, this has been a fairly overwhelming process, because I'm not very familiar with all these different organizations.” He added that he had “taken the time to perform site visits, make phone calls, perform interviews at different locations.”

Elizabeth Goldman, chief program officer at Social Advocates for Youth, said the challenge of finding committee members who can step in and participate fully is critical given the complexities involved.

“This homeless services system is very complex and takes years of study to be competent in how the funding streams work and how the services work, so it's not surprising that many of the people that are knowledgeable about that are providers, not all of them, but some of them,” Goldman said.

After recusals, “you're sometimes left with people who are not feeling super comfortable with if they really have the answer,” Goldman said. “But time is of the essence. So once you're six hours in, people have to start making decisions even when they aren't really ready.”

Coleman, in an interview, said that if he hadn’t independently researched different providers whose applications for funding left him wanting for answers he wouldn’t have ultimately felt able to vote.

"Considering the fact that we're under extraordinary time constraints to provide critical information and recommendations to leadership, there was no time to make a request for a site visit with the entire committee at times that were convenient for everyone, to call the provider in advance and make that happen,“ said Coleman.

“In all reality, the purpose of evaluating is to drill down on the data and the information. And if you don't understand it, you have a responsibility to go out there and get that understanding. Period,” Coleman said.

The process needs revamping and the CoC should in the future consider a longer funding cycle to bring stability to the process and allow service providers to plan better, said Gerry La Londe-Berg, a former county social worker and a member of Homeless Action of Sonoma County, an advocacy group.

“This year’s process was so dysfunctional that we should improve and come back in one year; then consider a two-year cycle,” La Londe-Berg wrote to the CoC board in a separate letter.

Asked to respond to the concerns raised by service providers, Dave Kiff, director of the county’s homelessness service division, which supplies staff support to the CoC as well as the funding committee, said in an email:

“This year involved a new process, a new committee, and new perspectives. Our Strategic Plan is new, too, and there are honest and reasonable disagreements about how to — and how quickly to — link the strategic plan to funding practices.”

Kiff said: “The providers have articulated a good path forward. We have similar ideas. We’re committed to working closely on very necessary improvements that increase effectiveness, transparency (and) equity.”

Sluyk, meanwhile, called the disjointed process an “opportunity.”

“In this situation, and I think everybody agrees everyone's on the same page, nobody's doubting this, we really need to, as the new version of this Continuum of Care board, figure out what this process is going to look like moving forward so that it's more effective and more efficient.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay