Measuring Progress
Ultimately, to achieve our community’s goals of making homelessness rare, brief, and one-time, we need to monitor our homeless response system through system performance measures.
The US Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), with the updated McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (the Act), views the local homeless response as a coordinated system as opposed to homeless programs and funding sources that operate independently in a community. To facilitate this perspective, the Act now requires communities to measure their performance as a system, in addition to analyzing performance by specific projects or project types.
The intent is for a Continuum of Care (CoC) to regularly measure their progress in meeting the needs of people experiencing homelessness in their community and to report this progress to HUD. Since 2015, CoCs submit their Performance Measures to HUD annually. At the left you can see how these measures relate to aspects of the system and goals.
System Performance Measures include:
Length of Time Homeless
Number of persons returning to homelessness once housed
Number of Total Homeless
Change in income (earned and total income)
Number of New persons entering homelessness
Number of persons retaining permanent housing or exiting to permanent housing
Report Contributors:
Andria Elhard, Program Associate
FM Coalition to End Homelessness
Carla Solem, Coordinator
West Central Minnesota Continuum of Care
Cody Schuler, Executive Director
FM Coalition to End Homelessness
Emma Schmit, Housing Director
CAPLP (Lakes & Prairies Community Action Partnership, Inc.),
Kyle Sample, Shelter Entry Coordinator
Micah’s Mission, Churches United
Gina Kautz, Homeless Programs Manager
Clay County Housing and Redevelopment Authority
Dara Lee, Executive Director
Clay County Housing and Redevelopment Authority
Megan Jenson, Senior Community Impact Manager
United Way of Cass-Clay
Sarah Kennedy , Prevention Director
Presentation Partners in Housing
Sarah Hasbargen, Southeastern North Dakota Community Action Agency (SENDCAA), Self-Sufficiency Coordinator
Dawn Bacon, Executive Director
Moorhead Public Housing Agency
Jill Elliott, Deputy Director
Fargo Housing and Redevelopment Authority
Thank you to:
Brett Lysne, Sandwich Club Design Co. for layout and design.
Institute for Community Alliances for assisting with CoC data.
A special thank you to Megan Jenson for coordinating and preparing both the 2019 and 2020 reports.