The Plan to End Homelessness in St. John’s (2014-2019), led by End Homelessness St. John’s (EHSJ), prioritizes the development of a systems approach grounded in Housing First where diverse services are organized and delivered in a coordinated manner to advance common community priorities. The purposeful, design and management of St. John’s homeless-serving system is critical to meeting the community’s objective of ending homelessness.
To this end, diverse community engagement processes were undertaken by EHSJ with the technical assistance of Turner Research & Strategy and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness to develop a System Coordination Framework. These included community forums, stakeholder interviews and focus groups from November 2015 to May 2016.
The resulting System Coordination Framework provides the community with direction on several key elements:
• Common homeless-serving system processes, including Coordinated Access and acuity assessment, program matching, eligibility and prioritization criteria.
• System mapping to discern the homeless-serving system’s structure and program components.
• Performance management and quality assurance standards in alignment with data collection, management and reporting through shared information systems.
• Capacity building needs and resources to deliver training and transition support to diverse services for successful Plan implementation.