Santa Cruz County Housing for Health (H4H) works to ensure that all residents have a safe and stable place to call home by identifying and building consensus around workable solutions to prevent and end homelessness, mobilizing and increasing community resources, and strengthening the capacity of individuals and organizations to accomplish lasting change.
H4H was created in November 2020 as a Division of the Santa Cruz County Human Services Department to bring together a coalition of key partners and resources to prevent and end homelessness within the County.
H4H works in the following areas:
4H serves as the lead agency for the Homeless Action Partnership (HAP), a collaboration of Santa Cruz County, each city within the County, and local homeless service providers. The HAP acts as a the federally-designated continuum of care, helping to allocate state and federal funds.
H4H also manages the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a shared database which service providers use to enter and review information about individual clients, including assessments and service utilization. Information is recorded only with client consent, and a variety of procedures are in place to ensure that personal information is not accessed except when necessary to provide services. The HMIS is required by state and federal funders.
H4H also applies for and manages federal and state grants. This includes monitoring grant opportunities, applying for grants, entering into contracts with community-based organizations to deliver services, monitoring and providing technical support to those agencies, and ensuring compliance with funder programmatic and reporting requirements.
H4H also develops policy to address the root causes of homelessness and engages in communications with leadership in the public and private sectors and with the general public. Through this policy and communications work, H4H raises awareness about the scope and causes of homelessness, feasible solutions, and how individuals and organizations can join in the effort to reduce homelessness in the County.
Homelessness can often be prevented by relatively small sums of money to meet basic needs and to give people a chance to shore up their existing support systems. H4H provides flexible funding to address such basic needs, including short-term rental assistance, security and pet deposits, move-in assistance, furnishings, damage repair, utility assistance, and relocation.
H4H also provides support for housing navigation and problem solving for people at risk of losing their housing. The work entails collaborating with clients to understand and address the root causes of their housing instability, to identify and connect with supports that could enable them to stay in their current housing or obtain new housing, and to create a plan to maintain housing.
The path from homelessness to housing starts by addressing basic needs. H4H provides funding for a range of outreach services and supports for people currently experiencing homelessness in Santa Cruz County. This includes the distribution of essential tangible resources such as water, granola bars, protein drinks, and groceries, clothing, sleeping bags, tents, bus passes, gift cards, flexible funds, hygiene kits, and clean injection supplies. Services include information and referral, Smart Path assessments, wound care, administration of Narcan, medical case management, service navigation, transportation, benefits counseling and assistance with benefit enrollments, claims, assistance obtaining identification documents and record requests, legal services, employment, medical, and mental health services, health education, hygiene services, laundry service, and peer support.
H4H also provides support for managed encampments and safe parking programs. These programs provide limited services and a measure of security for people living in tents and vehicles.
H4H contracts with community organizations to provide temporary shelter to single adults and families, with specialized facilities for survivors of domestic violence, transitional age youth, persons with severe mental illness, persons in hospice, veterans, and persons recuperating from hospital stays. Shelters are located in northern, central, and southern regions of the County, including unincorporated areas [?] and in the cities of Aptos, Santa Cruz, and Watsonville.
H4H works to mitigate housing unaffordability in Santa Cruz County through one-time flexible funding, medium and long-term rental assistance, permanent supportive housing, expanding affordable housing, shared housing models, relocation assistance, partnerships with property owners and managers, and work to help increase household incomes.
Permanent supportive housing is managed through Smart Path to Housing and Health, Santa Cruz County’s homeless coordinated entry system. H4H serves as the lead agency for Smart Path, which is a project of the local Continuum of Care, the Homeless Action Partnership, which includes H4H. For more information about Smart Path, click here.
Since March 2019, the County Human Services Department has been the lead in developing and implementing a COVID-19 homeless response. H4H’s predecessor, the Homeless Services Coordinating Office, was tasked to administer federal and state funds for COVID relief. The County leased hotel rooms to support persons experiencing homelessness to shelter in place. A new screening system was established to prioritize persons experiencing homelessness who were at greatest risk of complications from COVID for available motel and semi-congregate shelter spots. The new screening system also provided temporary motel rooms to persons confirmed or presumed COVID-19 positive who were unable to quarantine.
It is anticipated that between July and December 2021, as the COVID crisis eases and funding is withdrawn, the new shelter programs will gradually close. Prior to the closing of these shelters, however, new and existing federal, state, and local resources will be used to facilitate the movement of guests into permanent housing or other temporary housing while permanent housing is sought. Three new teams of case managers and housing navigators have been established. These teams will work with guests to identify opportunities to support long-term housing stabilization, including access to public benefits and other income sources and connections to health care services, including COVID-19 vaccinations. These expanded efforts and resources to support shelter guests began in March 2021 and will ramp up over time.