[Watch] Building Capacity of Community-Based Organizations

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2021 the U.S. Department of Treasury deployed $46 billion to support housing stability. Without existing local and state infrastructure to quickly deploy these federal rental assistance dollars, community-based organizations (CBOs) across the country played a key role in helping ensure the funding reached households that needed it most.

On February 15, 2024, we hosted a Connecting Communities webinar featuring experts who will share groundbreaking tactics used by three CBOs across the country. Discover essential principles for effectively distributing aid to marginalized communities and learn strategies to enhance the capabilities of CBOs for future challenges.

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Connecting Communities Building Capacity of Community-Based Organizations (video, 01:00:12).

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Transcript

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Sydney Diavua

Good afternoon, and welcome to Connecting Communities. Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, Building Capacity of Community-Based Organizations: Lessons Learned from the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. I’m Sydney Diavua, assistant vice president for community development at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and I’ll serve as your moderator for today’s session.

I would now like to take the time to introduce our speakers for today. Erin Barbee, chief strategy officer at DreamKey Partners. In this role, Erin is responsible for strategic planning, advocacy and partnership development.

Joe Horiye, Western Region Program, vice president for LISC. As a community and economic development professional with more than 20 years of nonprofit and leadership experience, Joe is responsible for LISC Urban Program offices in California, Washington, and Arizona.

Elizabeth Kneebone, assistant vice president, community development at the San Francisco Fed. Elizabeth manages the San Francisco Fed’s community development research team and shapes and contributes to its research portfolio with a focus on examining barriers to economic opportunity and promising practices to promote a strong, healthy, sustainable economy.

And Clare Wallace, executive director for South Louisville Community Ministries. Clare leads an organization which provides emergency assistance for residents facing crisis and works with partners and neighbors to better connect and advocate for residents. Before we get started, let’s move to slide four where we can take care of a few housekeeping items.

Views expressed during this session are those of the speakers and are intended for informational purposes only. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve System or Fed Communities.

Your microphones have been muted. Please use the Q&A feature throughout the session to submit questions. We promise to get to as many of them as possible during the Q&A portion of this presentation.

Keep the conversation going and engage with us on X, formerly known as Twitter, using the hashtag #connectingcommunities and visit fedcommunities.org for a variety of CD articles, resources and data across the Federal Reserve system. And finally, the session will be recorded, and the presentation, video, and podcast will be available on fedcommunities.org within two weeks of this event. I would like to turn the presentation over to my San Francisco Fed colleague, Elizabeth Kneebone. Elizabeth, the floor is yours.

Elizabeth Kneebone

Thank you, Sydney. I appreciate that introduction and I want to say thank you to everyone for joining today. This discussion, we really wanted to shine a light on the important role that community-based organizations play and their capacity brings to the local communities they serve. And this is a really important and timely conversation because that CBOs, this network of nonprofits that extends across the country is a really important part of the infrastructure that’s used to deliver federal, state, local resources to the communities that need them. And that can be community and economic development investments in low-income neighborhoods or areas. That can look like programs, services, work, supports for low-income households that can help stabilize those households, help them participate in the economy, work towards economic mobility and stability. And when the pandemic hit and the federal response deployed aid to respond to it, it really threw into sharp relief the important role that infrastructure plays.

But it also revealed that there’s unevenness in that infrastructure. There’s patchiness. Not every community that needs those resources necessarily has the same level of local institutional capacity or expertise that can help communities navigate funding streams and connect to the resources that they need. I think the pandemic also though showed and the response, the deployment of funds really showed the way what it can look like to build that capacity and extend that network. And today that’s what we really want to focus in on, especially with the employment. The emergency rental assistance program is the experience of that deployment of that program and the intersections with community-based capacity. I want to start in just framing today’s conversation, which is an overview of what the emergency rental assistance program looks like, how it worked. This program, it was deployed in two ways, but together it totaled more than 46 billion in dollars for emergency rental assistance in eviction prevention programs.

This is a brand-new program, stood up at the Treasury Department and it ended up creating hundreds of state, local tribal government emergency rental assistance programs. And by design, the way these funds were deployed were given the organizations localities had a lot of flexibility in the way that they could stand up these programs. And what we saw across the country is a lot of variety, a lot of diversity in the way these programs came to together and went to ground in the communities that they were serving. I think the hallmark of almost all of these programs was partnerships though. And in many times, in many cases, partnerships with local nonprofits, with community-based organizations to help deploy these funds. As a researcher who thinks a lot about the uneven landscape of this network of nonprofit capacity and how that can affect equity or create gaps and outcomes, top of mind for me in watching the deployment of this program was wondering how that intersection of that landscape of capacity with program deployment would affect how these dollars, excuse me, went out and reached the households they were meant to serve.

This is something I’ve been researching over the course of the program. On the resources page for this event, you’ll find a lot of publications that I’ve put out over the course of the last few years tracking these questions and exploring those in through different methods. But today I really wanted to focus in on two pieces of research in particular to help frame and ground today’s conversation. If we could go to the next slide. What I would like to focus on is the qualitative research that I’ve done, the conversations that I’ve had with providers and stakeholders across the country who were involved and have been involved in the deployment of local emergency rental assistance programs. I’ve over the years, been able to talk to dozens of stakeholders from large urban communities, suburban counties, rural communities who have administered programs of many different sizes from very large high dollar disbursements of ERAP funding to smaller sub grants and smaller communities and a more grassroots kind of approach.

It’s been a wide range of organizations. Their starting point in their capacity journey through ERA vary a lot at the outset. But what I learned in speaking to these providers across the country is, one, it was really clear that that local ecosystem, what that potential partnership landscape looks like from community to community really did shape the design of these programs. It really impacted the way these programs were put together, whether local governments or state governments chose to partner how and with whom all sort of reflected the variable landscapes that they were starting from before the pandemic hit. But what also came through in these conversations was not just that local capacity influenced the design of these programs, but the deployment of these programs also impacted the capacity of the organizations involved with administering the program. And across the spectrum from smaller organizations to larger to urban to rural, three key themes really emerged about the ways that ERAP dollars impacted the local capacity of these organizations.

One was through staffing, even if temporarily adjustments to staffing to be able to handle the volume of need that organizations were working to meet in the community. Partnerships also really came to the fore. The importance of both working through existing partnerships, perhaps deepening existing partnerships to administer this program, but also creating new networks, broadening that pool of collaboration to really be as effective as possible and reaching the communities who were really in need of these funds. The other element that really emerged and came to the fore was technology. And that could look different depending on the organization. For some, it was moving from paper, getting off paper applications to PDF fillable forms. For others, it was designing much more robust backend data systems that would allow them to coordinate more effectively across programs across partners in the deployment of the ERAP program.

Most recently I had a chance to revisit some of these conversations to come back to people I had interviewed in 2022 and talk to them a year and a half later to see what their experience was and how they were reflecting on the impact ERAP had had on their community and on those who they were serving, now that the dollars were largely in many cases exhausted or coming to an end. And you’ll see that the most recent study, it was actually released this week from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Again, you can find that on the sources page, but what we found in those conversations is now moving into this period where the ERAP dollars are coming to an end. Many of the providers I spoke to, all of them, were talking about the extent to which they had to scale back.

There really just is no other sort of funding stream that can replace what this temporary large scale emergency response was meant to accomplish. Having to scale back and reorient depending on what resources are available to take place at those funds, that also has implications for what types of services can be provided, the level of services provided, but also staffing so many who had brought on staff or temporary staff during the pandemic as these dollars are coming to an end or having to let those staff go or reorient their staffing models. Some of the more durable capacity extensions though that came to the fore were really, again, partnerships and technology, but some of those improvements or new ways of working really seem more tangible, or sorry, durable. They’re stickier. More and more of those who I interviewed thought that those would persist moving forward beyond the pandemic.

But this is a really interesting moment to step back and think about how has the experience of ERAP impacted the capacity of organizations and also what lessons, we can move to the next slide, can we take from this to think not just about emergency response but longer term, how do we expand this network? How do we strengthen the network that is so important in the way that we deliver resources to the communities that need them? And with that, I would love to invite our excellent panel, the panelists that we have to share their experiences with us to come on camera and we can start the discussion to learn from what they have taken away from this experience.

Clare, Erin, Joe, please come on camera. And I would love to actually start the discussion with Clare. Turning to you, I know that your organization, you had already been partnering with the Association of Community Ministries in the Louisville area even before the pandemic to deliver services. But when the pandemic hit and ERA came about, can you talk a bit more about how those partnerships may have evolved or changed or your way of operating may have changed in response to that?

Clare Rutz Wallace

Yeah, absolutely. I’m thrilled to be here. I have been a little obsessed with this topic since April of 2020, so I’ve lived and breathed it for years. And so just thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to talk about it for the next 45 minutes. We were distributing rent and utility assistance in collaboration with 12 other community ministries and to make sure that we were covering essentially the entire county that is Louisville, Kentucky. And we worked very closely with the city, but as far as funding goes for eviction prevention, rent assistance, before the pandemic, it was about $650,000 through the whole year. Very, very small numbers. It was really there for housing stabilization purposes. It was less than even what we were spending on utility assistance throughout the year. There was really no eviction prevention services to speak of. We were providing maybe $250 a month. The point was to stabilize someone for 30 days and it was very transactional.

Obviously, things changed rapidly when funding was… And there was an opportunity to make sure that people did have financial assistance, especially during the pandemic. And so we definitely deepened our cross-sector collaboration very specifically. We already, again, we’re working with one of the departments within the city, but it expanded to the Office of Housing. And we’ve been in a very collaborative partnership with them ever since. We were essentially… It started out where they had an appointment portal in which people can get online, but it was very hard to find. The URL had a lot of numbers in it, et cetera. And so we were hearing from people because we were such a reputable entry point for people in crisis, we saw our numbers skyrocket and they’re saying, “We hear that there are millions of dollars for rent assistance, but we have no idea how and where to get it.”

We launched StopMyEviction.org to make sure that when people were talking about it, including the city, we were able to say a quick simple URL with very clear steps. And that website and that work has evolved quite drastically throughout the few years as funding has changed and as programs have increased. We definitely were able to create that accessibility pattern but then we also found out that even that wasn’t especially accessible. We hired 25 contractors essentially to make sure that the most vulnerable were able to be connected to that rent assistance. And that was the beginning of a very nimble limb and arm essentially of the ERAP program where we can expand and change our system, our language without that bureaucratic, that red tape. We were just a very close partner so that we could be the nimble side of the important work.

Elizabeth Kneebone

That’s great. And you really do hear those themes I think coming through in that too, the staffing, the partnerships, the technology through the portal that you built. Erin, I’d love to turn to you and think about your organization and its experience in coming to ERAP because DreamKey partners as a affordable housing developer and a community development financial institution. You definitely had residents in your buildings that were in need of these services, but you hadn’t previously been in the business of deploying rental assistance. Can you talk a bit about how you came into that partnership and the role that you played?

Erin Barbee

Absolutely, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for having me and allowing us the opportunity to talk about this. As you mentioned, our organization is an affordable housing developer and we have a large portfolio of people that we serve who are at 80% of area median income and below. And when the pandemic hit, we saw that our population was suffering at the highest levels and we actually couldn’t do anything about it at the very beginning because the organization in Charlotte, North Carolina that primarily serves as the vehicle for rental assistance was doing that work until they said they had to close their doors. And that was a huge negative impact on our community because they only did work in person. They didn’t have an opportunity to shift quickly to be able to serve people virtually or in a way that they didn’t have to leave their homes, so we stepped up. We were challenged with being able to provide for not only our communities but the community at large.

And we did that through strategic partnership at first. Our partnership, we helped with another nonprofit organization that happens to hold the landlord consortium. We felt like it was very smart for us to go on this journey together because they had easy access to landlords already established relationships, and we didn’t need to climb that hill per se. And so with seed funding from United Way, we had about $500,000 to start a program. And DreamKey Partners created the technology side of it that was very humble in the very beginning. We had Excel sheets and Smartsheets that we utilized because we recognized we were maybe going to serve 300 people with $500,000. And that program quickly was taken note by the city and the county because they received the funds as Clare had mentioned, and now what do we do? And so they turned to our organization to say, “Can you scale this?”

And of course we said yes because we were up to the challenge and we knew that we needed to be able to serve our community in this way. Our barrier at first was technology, as you mentioned. We had partnership, we had the government on our side, we had money coming in, but technology was our barrier because we knew that there were thousands of people that needed access to these dollars. And the pot was no longer 500,000, it was in the millions. And so we implemented a backend process through Salesforce that was very detailed and provided us the opportunity to grow with the program. And as we know treasury, I guess you all feel this every other week, sent us new rules for how this program was going to operate and how we needed to report and what we needed to report and whose hands it goes into.

The list goes on and on. And so for us, having the technology to be able to be nimble, as Clare said, and move easily to get these dollars out was extremely important. Ultimately we ended up serving over 20,000 families and $120 million out the door. And to Clare’s point, we couldn’t have done that without increasing our staffing as well. We hired 50 temporary workers while we had the funding in order to execute things quickly because money needed to go out within a week or less in order to make sure that people didn’t experience eviction. And so we ran fast and furious all up until about now when the funds are almost depleted and we’re faced with what do we do, which we’ll talk more about. But our organization overall has become a go-to for eviction prevention and rental assistance deployment because of what we came up with out of the pandemic. It’s been a journey.

Elizabeth Kneebone

And I hear that use of nimble, that ability to be that flexible and responsive arm resonating with both you and Clare. And to your point about stepping into new spaces, the backend technology and capability that you had to be able to do that in the moment where it was the most pressing need. I feel like that is a good tee in to bring Joe into the conversation and where you come from with it. You’re at a national community development financial institution, you also have that sort of backend infrastructure and some experience with capacity building. Would love to hear more about LISC’s involvement at the state partnership, state of California and the role that you played in helping deploy the state’s program.

Joe Horiye

Thank you very much Elizabeth for having me. It’s great to be here today and participate. In terms of LISC, I actually think having the background as a CDFI was helpful for an organization that’s national but local and focus, our focus being lifting places, lifting people, and lifting economies, there’s two ways that we do it. And I think that was helpful. Number one, it’s through money, grants, equity, and loans. The ability to deploy grants, equity and loans. And number two, maybe more importantly for us in particular at LISC, is really our focus on human capital investments, so nonprofit capacity building, organizational development, training, technical assistance. But I think that in terms of overall consideration for involvement, what helped us, I think give greater consideration to this in our role certainly need on behalf of the neighborhoods and communities that were being served. I’m going to spend a little bit more time on this in just a little bit, but I think our model is such that it really relies on being a strategic partner, both at the grassroots and the grasstops level, both from the public sector and the private sector.

And I think that also was a critical element. I think being a nonprofit capacity builder itself was key. Experience also in administering other emergency rental assistance or deploying other dollars was also helpful, although not certainly at this scale and the impact. And I think having a 40-year presence in the state of California with three offices covering the state, Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, as well as a national rural program that was covering rural areas in between was also an important part of our consideration. Then you add to that, I think, the financial bench strength of our agency, the infrastructure including our size and teams having a pretty solid fiscal management history and an ability to design larger initiatives, keeping community centered as part of the solution, I think was pretty key. And that’s going to be a common theme for me, but when we talk about the strategic partnerships, I think we were very specialized in what we were going to do.

The state of California took the lead. We ourselves had a data management firm and mapping firm over urban footprint that handled that piece for us that could handle the eviction risk maps. And they also had a tool that we were able to use. We had a case manager partner, we had a project manager partner at the end of the day, LISC was responsible for overseeing the local partnership network that ended up being, to date 176 community-based organizations. That is really our main focus here, so I think that in our case for the California Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which is the largest of it kind in the country. And of course I think some big things came out of it with those 176 partners, we were able to deploy $4.7 billion for more than 370,000 households at an average clip of about $12,000 in emergency assistance for families at the end of the day.

And I think that the other key thing was that 80%, 80% of the applicants assisted were either very low or extremely low income households earning less than 50% of the AMI. And I think I would be somewhat remiss if I didn’t just give a big shout-out and thank you, thank you, thank you to all the partners that really made this happen. We’ll talk a little bit more of how we structured this I know in a little bit, but again, the California Emergency Rental Assistance Program in California was a team sport. It was not an individual sport and we would not have been able to do this if everybody didn’t have their particular focus role job to play. And I think overall we were able to come away with some big impact numbers and big scale.

Elizabeth Kneebone

Absolutely. And I think your final point there really speaks to, it’s good to reiterate that this was sort of the equivalent of turning on the fire hose of funding in the middle of an emergency where people really needed that money and trying to stand something up in such short order. That’s all hands on deck kind of moment. I’d love to hear from you all reflect on your experience looking back at ERAP now that we’ve got a little distance from the more intense pressure of the first days of the program. And just offer, if you see any lessons or takeaways that you would either for another emergency rental assistance, a situation in the future where we might have, again, who knows what that might look like, but another need for a quick response to an emergency situation. Or longer term, what you saw and what it took to deploy that program that you think could just benefit this whole ecosystem longer term. And I’d love to start with Erin for that.

Erin Barbee

Thank you so much. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to reflect on what could we have done differently and what would we do if this were to happen again. And part of the disappointment for me during this whole process was we were executing this program so quickly that it felt like we were just putting band-aids on every person, every minute, every moment in order to make sure that they were stable enough, but we weren’t necessarily digging deeper into their financial situations or life situations in order to wrap around services so that they could continue long-term success with the funds that we gave them. Almost like seed funding for success to keep them at bay. And if we were to go into this, again, I think partnerships of course would be extremely important, but I would want to make sure that they were diverse partnerships that met all of the needs of the whole person. Because when people would come back to us and ask for money again, it was because of something else dire that has happened that may not have been directly related to the COVID outbreak.

And I was like, “Wow, we can’t offer you anything else right now.” And that was heartbreaking. And so I think that we could do, I don’t want to say better, because we all did the best that we could, but we could have more thought in the immediate present to say, how can this whole person be impacted positively? And then beyond that, I would like to think about the fund usage. We did what the government asked us to do, but I felt like our local government should have said, well, at the end of this funding, there’s still going to be a cliff. How can we reallocate some of our budget dollars in order to make sure that this is a slow ride down instead of a stop? Which is what happened because then our community was impacted pretty heavily because the funds dried up and there were no other resources ready to go to continue to help people. God forbid we have another pandemic, I think we will be better for it because we have organizations that have responded to emergency quickly and are interested in making sure that people don’t continue to fall off.

Elizabeth Kneebone

You mentioned before the guidance that came out in different waves at the beginning of the program. That was something that came through in the most recent research was respondents saying they wish they’d had more guidance on the packet or how do you wind this down in a thoughtful way? Just to your point. Joe, is there anything you’d like to add from your experience or LISC’s experience?

Joe Horiye

I agree with everything and I think the great thing, Elizabeth, about doing these conveniences, I’ve learned so much from my fellow panelists here as well in their programs. I think just some real quick takeaways for me. We often say that the work of community development or the work that we do with communities moves at the speed of trust. I just want to reemphasize the importance of the LPN partners themselves in ensuring that community is always centered as part of the solution. I think that was key. And I think the community-based partners were key because in our case, they were trusted messengers. And I don’t want to ever underestimate the relational and human touch points of what this program was about at the end of the day. CBOs were our lifeline. They still continue to be as we’re in the wind down phase, but I think, I know like a lot of other things in life, not all community-based organizations are at the same place or in the same space for a variety of different reasons.

It could be a different stage of just their organizational life cycle, their mission or other. I think what was unique here in the program design is that it was good to have different entry points to try and fit different capacities of different organizations because we had just such a big region to cover throughout the state, both urban and rural at the end of the day. Those entry points for us ended up becoming really key. And so there were five different entry points where people could come into the situation here, but there was an opportunity for them to enter but also grow. Of the five, they could come in at a… Say they came in at three, if you came in at three, you had to be able to do one, two, and three. But if you came in at a three, we have some groups that exited as a five that they could take on more responsibility.

They grew as part of the process. And I agree, I wish that we would’ve had more time for planning and to be able to address readiness, but I think having upfront the ability and our background from a capacity building standpoint, five different entry points allowed people to… It allowed us to meet them where they were at. And those five places were promotion, outreach, appointments and technical assistance, popups and door knocking is really the strategies that were embedded there. And then I think that what we also learned was, because our CBOs always remind us this, cultural competence mattered. We had issues that we needed to deal with, transportation, geographic, but our LPNs covered on any given day on average, 22 different languages. And then we’ve talked about this before, the use of data was critical in not just calibrating the program, it was probably even more important in recalibrating strategies.

And combining that data with our on the boots campaign was highly critical. In fact, 98% of the population that was deemed the highest eviction risk were within a 25-mile radius of an LPN partner. And I don’t think we would’ve been able to do that without the data helping us combine with the on the boots campaign. And then I think technology. I want to just say that in technology, I think that there are different systems that we did and different tools that the CBOs had to learn, but I think for the end users and the applicants, what we also learned there is still a digital divide in pockets and areas of California. And so we needed to ensure that technology also meant telephone town halls, text messaging through our partner United Way and their 211 system. I just wanted to make sure that we collectively look at that, because I think there’s a need for the CBOs, but there’s then also a need in terms of who we’re trying to reach as was already eloquently shared.

Elizabeth Kneebone

Absolutely. And in some ways it’s equipping the CBOs with the right technology to be able to reach the folks in the hardest to reach communities. Clare, do you have any thoughts you’d like to add?

Clare Rutz Wallace

Yes. This has been so helpful because again to Joe’s point, it’s when we meet together as partners across the nation, we realize, oh, we’re all learning the same things. I wonder why. And it is a little disconcerting, but also helpful to realize that we are going through a lot of these same foundational challenges. And so accessibility, I think everything that you’re talking about, Joe, is making sure we have these entry points and we’re using technology. It’s making sure that we’re honoring the need to have… Just because something exists doesn’t mean it’s accessible. And I think we learned the hard way that that’s really, really critical, especially if we’re thinking about equity. And also making sure that the people who are most vulnerable are not forgotten. And then I cannot stress enough Erin’s point around that work around with accompaniment, thinking about those layered needs in order to have that long-term stabilization.

And I’m hoping to talk more about that when we’re thinking about next steps. But I just want to say yes, yes, yes to those pieces. I think one I would add is also this room for paying attention to creating an infrastructure for paying attention to a friction point. We were listening very closely to our service providers. I think sometimes for the first time we were handing them the microphone saying, “What are you experiencing? Who are we? What’s the need? What’s happening?” And we were listening and we could hear these friction points like, this is still an issue. Or we tried to serve everybody who went to court, but then people were being brought to court because that’s how they got rent assistance. And our direct service providers were able to say, ooh, this is an unintended consequence, let’s adjust. And so having this feedback loop between direct service providers and the stakeholders who are helping guide a lot of these internal policies, it was so critical because we were able to address a lot of those emerging and sometimes longstanding friction points.

And I think we were able to do that because again, there was all of this money. The goal was to distribute it as quickly and as equitably as possible. And so it really fostered this abundant culture when we have been, I think as CBOs, as community-based organizations operating typically in the scarcity mindset. Just the doors were blown wide open as far as potential and really innovated collaboration. And then just honesty about what people could do and what people couldn’t do and what you were good at and what I was good at. And so we brought down silos, but built lanes and we were… It was constant, weekly for a very long time. Now we’re still meeting monthly of what’s the friction point, what’s the service gap, what’s the barrier? What are we doing in order to move towards that north star towards housing stabilization?

And a lot was able to be propped up that made the rent assistance that was available incredibly catalytic for both the community, but also those individuals. Yes, I would just… And the room for complexity in those friction points I think was really key for every single duo, landlord, tenant, that was a different relationship with a different need with a layered story. And I think we are also learning now how to honor that complexity both with our infrastructures that we’re building, but also the data that we’re collecting. Because sometimes when we collect really simplified data, because where do you start when you’re talking about such a complex thing, you lose a lot of those really important truths to the complexity of the situation.

Elizabeth Kneebone

I want to pick up, I like the way that you said that the time of abundance. The time of abundance and urgency has past now, and we’re more back to that scarcity situation. And I’d love to hear you all think about that as you reflect on your own organizations, the infrastructure you had to build and what you’re taking beyond ERAP, do you think that there are ways that it has informed your operating models or the way that you conceive of your work moving forward because you had had that experience of going through that crucible? And I would love to start with Joe with that one.

Joe Horiye

I would just say yes, yes, yes. I think the experience of the California ERAP program really pushed us to rethink about operating at even larger scale and impact. I think there was definitely some stretch moments for us, some learning moments, some growth moments there. But I’ll also say this, I think what it forced us to do in thinking that way is it’s also provided a foundation and a model of how we look at other work. And so I can think about our childcare partnership with the state of Arizona that’s led by our Phoenix LISC office in terms of helping out more than 500 operators there. I think even back here, back at home in California. I think we’re excited about really taking the lead and working with the state HCD, our housing community development department to assist them on the foreclosure intervention housing prevention program, more affectionately known as FIHPP.

The other things that come to mind, just real quick, speed. I think everybody has reemphasized that we had to go and then you made improvements along the way. We know a lot more today. I think that the former president of LISC used to tell us and I think people here would agree, we launched this thing perfectly imperfect and had to make improvements as we continue to move along the way. And I would say that what it has also forced us to do just as an organization is revisit the entire business model. We have to look at programs and ops, especially if it’s going to be of a larger scope and scale. There are things that just come to mind in terms of program design, teams, structure, legal technology. By the way, these are government funds, compliance and the talent necessary to do things. But what I think this ultimately leads to at the end of the day is readiness.

And I mean that in the sense that how can we collectively be more ready for the next opportunity because I think there are going to continue to be other things that come up. I think the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is a potential opportunity there. Obviously we know that climate change and resiliency and disaster preparedness. I think there’s also some lessons that we can learn from the LPN network in terms of utility, even if it’s only regionalized or segments or certain coalitions that also came out of the strategic partnerships of the LPN network there. And I’ll just leave it at that as a couple of things that I think how it impacts us and our work moving forward.

Elizabeth Kneebone

Perfect. And I’ll hand it over to Clare to see where your organization is now.

Clare Rutz Wallace

I think that the challenge is how do we build… How do we take all of these things that abundance, all that money made room for and continue that momentum? And I do think that it is possible to create abundant programming even with the reality of scarcity. And so we’ve launched, again, trying to think about that wind down, okay, how can we take less financial assistance but have a bigger impact? And one of the things that we learned again, is that those layered needs. Take a really good poll essentially of the ecosystem of care within Louisville for us specifically, and figure out essentially how we can layer as many resources and people around somebody who is facing housing stabilization issues. And so we have just launched the Neighbor Network, and this is essentially our response to everything we’ve learned in the last now three years to try and see how we might rethink how we’re using emergency rent assistance, but utility assistance, food, et cetera.

We are trying to essentially build these journey maps where we’re paying attention to every single potential basic need that someone might need and create these feedback loops between service providers, but also neighbors and clients who need that assistance. What is your complex situation? How is it fitting in with what is available to you? And what are those service gaps and barriers to have your basic needs just not being met? And so we’re taking those realities and we’re lifting them up to that level to stakeholders saying, “This just doesn’t exist. We don’t have any furniture programs in Louisville, Kentucky. What should we do about that?”

And so we’re looking at all of the layers all at once, again, trying to say, even if we can’t give you money right now, we are going to assist in literally as many ways as the ecosystem of care allows and we’re going to accompany you through that entire process. It is a huge lift as far as a connected networked ecosystem of care, but it is, we’re trying to take all the lessons learned and make sure that any financial assistance that might be coming down the pipeline, either in response to the next crisis that is inevitable or not, is that we’ll have this more wraparound program that Erin was referring to in the future, but something also to highlight really what’s missing and what’s possible in the future as well.

Elizabeth Kneebone

Erin, would you like to chime in as well in that Mueller wraparound theme?

Erin Barbee

Sure. I’ll quickly add, because my fellow panelists have covered many of the great things that my organization is also experiencing. But I will add that part of our charter now going forward is to continue to do rental assistance within the work that we do. It’s who we are now, and that’s not going away, but what’s within our purview is to be able to adjust the programs that we had previously. Our program wasn’t called ERAP, it was called RAMP, Rental and Mortgage Assistance Program. We look at the continuum right from housing into getting into stable homeownership. And so we’ve adjusted back even further to rental assistance to say, what can we do for those who are going from homelessness to renting and how can we wrap around them with education? And how can we wrap around them with more resources so that they can have success on that part of the journey?

That has changed us forever. Now we’re doing ready to rent, homeownership journey and then homeownership, so that’s huge for us. Outside of our individual organization, we’re partnering with the city and county to continue to evaluate how we can address the homelessness to housing stability as well. And so we have a program called Home for All, and that program has been incredible to look at the strategic way that we move forward and how we can pool our funding. And that comes from both government sources, from private dollars, it comes from nonprofit, it comes from national organizations to be able to address specific areas.

And we’re going to start with rental assistance because of COVID and we don’t want to have that ledge and people to drop off. But ideally, organizations would be identified very widely that they are the ones that do rental assistance. And then that makes it easier for our customer to be able to say, I know I need to go to DreamKey Partners, or I need to go to United Way, wherever it may be. And so that evaluation is extremely important. I’ll pause there because I know that we want to have time for questions. Thank you.

Elizabeth Kneebone

Yes, thank you so much. And I know we’ve been getting some great questions in the Q&A and Sydney’s here to help walk us through the audience Q&A. But I’d also like to just say thank you for this already rich discussion and all the work that you all are doing and helping us all learn from the experiences that you’ve had. But I’ll pass it over to Sydney to moderate the Q&A.

Sydney Diavua

Thanks Elizabeth. And yes, we have been getting lots of great questions. Please to our participants, if you’ve got a question entered into the Q&A function and we’ll make sure to try to get to as many as we can. The first question is actually on the topic we were on, which is about how sources of capital and funding for this type of work. And so for the full group, the first question is, what do you see as specific ways funders both public and philanthropic, can provide support in building the organizational capacity that is critical to reach disconnected populations? Joe, why don’t we start with you. Joe, I think you’re still on mute.

Joe Horiye

I think first is that the capacity building piece is highly critical. If I had a magic wand at the end of the day, it would be greater investment in terms of working with philanthropy and other stakeholders to make sure that we’re addressing capacity building agencies of the community-based organizations that we’re working with, which would include addressing both programmatic and the operational side of the house because they have a business model that they need to also support at the end of the day. And then I think also in addition to that, ideally if we had enough time, they would also have a roadmap so they know exactly how to elevate their game in terms of both those strategic areas of programs and ops. And then the second part of the question, was it the difficult to reach populations?

Sydney Diavua

That’s right. How do you reach difficult and disconnected populations with this type of capital?

Joe Horiye

I think through the program we realized that it was different touch points at the end of the day, but it was also, I think looking back, aside from just the speed that we had to work at in terms of the geographic and the other, I do think that the cultural competence matters. And I think that when the next one comes up, we have a lot more data to work with, which will be helpful in terms of targeting. I think the bench strength of nonprofits will also be hopefully in a better position, at least it won’t be, in some cases, a first time exercise for them. And then we will even be better prepared and equipped as well with both information and technical know-how and really exercising that muscle. I think that when it comes to LISC, the priority for us has always been for the last 40 years, is really lifting places, lifting people, and lifting those economies that are harder to reach disenfranchised with diverse communities. I think that’s part of LISC’s DNA, and we will just get… We will continue to get better here with time and more knowledge.

Erin Barbee

Sydney, may I add something?

Sydney Diavua

Please.

Erin Barbee

Around reaching our disconnected harder to reach population, I do think that when we receive grant dollars, it’s important to think about marketing, not in the traditional sense, not I’m going to put an ad on the television. I’m thinking for us to be able to pay grassroots organizations to build their own capacity to get the tools that they need to reach people, whatever that may look like, to be able to get more supplies to print things out for our older adults that are not going to be able to have access to this technology easily, to be able to do a bus ad or to put something in places that you probably wouldn’t think of on a day-to-day basis. And I think at times we get money for programs and we do not get money for the other piece to help us reach people, and that is just as important. Those dollars have to be diversified in order to reach those populations. I have a soapbox about this. I’m going to get off of it for a moment, but I just want to make sure that that message is out there.

Sydney Diavua

Well, I’m going to ask you to step back up just for a moment because we have a question for you specifically about technology, and it’s, did you have to pay for Salesforce? And if so, is the cost of the program and that technology, was it a limitation to scaling up the program?

Erin Barbee

Yes, so we did have to pay for Salesforce, a portion of it. Through the grant dollars that we received from the City of Charlotte, they allowed us to have a technology line item. But it didn’t reach the height that we needed it to for our organization to be fully impacted, positively, meaning it was going to help us programmatically, but not as a full organization. We opted to readjust our line items and our budget to allow for another $300,000 or so over a three-year period of time that we would personally invest in our Salesforce system because we knew it was going to be a long-term program for us outside of these funds. But without the initial funding from the City of Charlotte, we would not have been able to even contribute a portion to get to where we were.

Sydney Diavua

Thanks, Erin. Clare, I’d like to bring you into the conversation. We have a question. What role has the Interagency Council on Homelessness had on homelessness prevention and rehousing during the pandemic? And has that proven to be a good vehicle for the national coordination of services and approaches?

Clare Rutz Wallace

I can speak to essentially how that is translated to Louisville. Our local coalition for the Homeless is a part of HUD’s continuum of care processes. And so they have a way where you call a line, you’re asked questions and you are on someone’s radar. There is an outreach team who knows where you are and what some of those basic needs that you have might be. They have reached out saying most of what we do is actually eviction prevention because there is no version of this for people who are losing their housing. There is no continuum of care, especially in Louisville for the people who are right above that HUD defined homelessness and beyond. And so we said, okay, well, let’s learn from your continuum of care process and your common assessment that line, that intake. Because they’ve gone through how to prioritize and triage and what to ask and how to ask.

And we learned a lot from them in that work so that we were able to build that continuum of care while we’re beginning to, so that was actually key too. And they’re also relieved to say, okay, at least now there is a line because the services are dramatically different. There’s a lot of gray in between for sure, but the services are dramatically different when you’re talking about HUD and homeless work and then you’re talking about eviction prevention and stabilization work. It’s a different part of that spectrum, so to have two separate continuum of cares is really, really critical.

Sydney Diavua

Thanks, Clare. We’ve got time for one more question, and so I’m hoping that we can go to you, Erin, with this one. The hardest hit were BIPOC communities where there was a lack of equity and critical considerations of the most impacted communities. And so how will you prioritize BIPOC people in the future? And it seems like the question also could relate to the work that you did in California, Joe.

Erin Barbee

It was alarming how the BIPOC community was impacted by COVID. And I think what we’ve seen is that… What we did successfully was to embed ourselves in the communities where they’ve been most impacted, and to be able to provide ongoing resources. To Clare’s point, continuing to have those partnerships is important so that when unfortunately, if something happens, again, we’ve already established those strong relationships. And if they are the hardest hit, again, we are not starting from scratch. The work that we’re doing now is going to continue to prepare us for that work in the future that I hope never has to happen. But as we know, the disenfranchised community, the BIPOC community has been impacted long before COVID, and we all have a lot of work to do to continue to lift that community up. But again, I want to make sure that we are establishing those familiar relationships going forward so those communities can be helped right away.

Sydney Diavua

Thanks. Joe, any words about how that played out in California?

Joe Horiye

We had it top of mind, and I think that we will only get better from here. And in terms of… It obviously was a priority for us at the end of the day. When we were looking at the 98% of the folks at the greatest at risk populations, it wasn’t a surprise that it was BIPOC. And we tried to put together the best game plan to be able to do that. But I do think it is something that we’ll continue to have to double down to make sure that we’re reaching who we need to reach at the end of the day. But again, I think we are walking away with some very good best practices here, and we’ll just continue to get better from here on out.

Sydney Diavua

Thank you. That’s all the time we have for questions, but I wanted to say thanks to our speakers for providing insightful information and engaging the audience. And attendees, thank you for spending your valuable time with us today. But before we end the session, we have a few requests. Please complete the survey. We’ll send it to you immediately after today’s event so we can improve and continue to bring you timely and relevant topics.

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