Clark County and the city of Springfield are partnering up with the local United Way to address homelessness through a community-wide strategic plan titled "All In Clark County: Addressing Homelessness Together."
United Way of Clark, Champaign and Madison counties stated it will work with community members, people with lived experience with homelessness, and local organizations, and collect data to get at the root causes of the growing homelessness across the region.
"I'm really excited that we have all the right players at the table. Everybody's been very open about being a part of this process. We're gonna have transparency and community input," said Chad Wilson, executive director of United Way of Clark, Champaign and Madison counties. "We're looking at faster pathways to housing and services, equitable outcomes and better coordination in the long-term on continuum of care."
A $200,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Development is paying for the plan. Wilson said this funding was exactly what their community had been waiting for.
"One of the things that we always lacked was having the funding to get the subject matter expert in to really help reset the conversation to best management practices. To ways that can really bring cross sector collaboration into the conversation. So it's a great thing that we're doing," he said.
Wilson said their research shows that about 43% of Clark County residents don’t earn enough money to make ends meet and that number is reflected across the state.
"People are facing things for the first time a lot of times and homelessness obviously is a spectrum," he said. "But ever since COVID, we're seeing a pretty steep increase in folks facing homelessness."
'Moving beyond just homeless crisis response'
All In Clark County: Addressing Homelessness Together is is in the first of three phases. It is forming a steering committee and having preparatory conversations with Springfield and Clark County staff.
Work will take place over 12 to 15 months, digging into the cause of homelessness through focus groups, interviews, and co-visioning and design sessions.
Wilson said they contracted the consulting group Element to formulate this strategic plan.
“Not just build a plan that goes on a shelf, but to build a plan that has action items that will birth a coalition going forward and that continuum of care across that spectrum of homelessness will be addressed," he said.
Tom Albanese, a consultant and the principal owner of Element, said his organization was called in for its expertise in responding to housing insecurity, having worked with larger and smaller counties across the nation.
"I like to say, we're moving beyond just homeless crisis response, better shelters and housing assistance to first focusing on better prevention," he said.
He said their plan will align with Springfield 2051, the city's new community building process which came together over the last year.
Wilson said the community building project was born when Springfield was brought to the national stage after false claims about the Haitian immigrant community spread across national news.
"One of the things that came to the surface very quickly was 'How are we telling our story and what is our story? Where do we want to be as a community in the next 25 years as we celebrate our 250-year bicentennial," he said.
He said All In Clark County: Addressing Homelessness Together will work directly with community members immediately impacted by homelessness and draw solutions from lived experiences.
"Not just the steering committee members, but the broader community," he said. "So we'll bringing them in this summer to co-design what should the future response look like in Clark County."
The organizations are also working with Think Tank as they plan this part of the preparation and landscape assessment phase.
