Knoxville’s Homeless Service Provider Roundtable is made up of our three largest homeless service providers: Knox Area Rescue Ministries (KARM), Salvation Army (SA), and Volunteer Ministry Center (VMC).
The Ten-Year Plan office gets together with this group on a regular basis to continue to develop a better understanding of who is doing what in support of the Ten-Year Plan and to coordinate our efforts to bring about an end to chronic homelessness in our city.
The Roundtable met recently for a half-day. Here’s some of the stuff we talked about.
Designated Agency Function: Who’s doing what?
Designated Agency Function (DAF) is a very relevant issue right now. One of the most important things our Ten-Year Plan does is to help coordinate the moving parts of the homeless services provider community. Emergency Services, Supportive Housing, and Employment are the three functions identified as designated agency functions.
The idea is that each of Knoxville’s largest agencies in will be the designated leader in one of these roles. This coordination and specialization will reduce duplication of services and improve communication. Here’s a breakdown:
1. Emergency Services: KARM
2. Permanent Supportive Housing: VMC
3. Employment: SA
While our goal is to reduce duplication of services, we will not completely eliminate it, and that’s okay. For example KARM operates a culinary training program in collaboration with Second Harvest Food Bank. KARM won’t stop offering that program in light of SA being designated as the Employment leader.
Discussion of definitions
What does emergency mean? What is Permanent Supportive Housing? What do we agree that we mean when we say case management? These are just a few terms that we need to nail down.
All of the agencies working to end chronic homelessness in Knoxville and Knox County must have a shared lexicon for homelessness. That’ll help us communicate with each other. It will also make it easier for the TYP to communicate its message effectively and accurately to the public.
Here’s a partial list of terms that the TYP office agreed to define and bring back to the group: serious mental illness, permanent supportive housing, emergency shelter, stages of change, and case management. There are a few other critical terms, but these are the big ones.
Core Values of the TYP
The group discussed and reaffirmed these core values for the Ten-Year Plan. All agreed that these core values will inform our efforts to end chronic homelessness in Knoxville.
1. Personal Responsibility/Accountability; giving responsibility back the homeless.
We agree that we must give responsibility for homelessness back to the homeless individual. We do need to protect people from starvation and other immediate hazards of the street, but we don’t need to communicate approval of very poor choices, of an unhealthy mentality and lifestyle. We DO communicate this kind of approval, and this habit of approval is very entrenched and hard to dismantle.
We should not work harder than they do. We need to elicit their energy, their commitment to attacking their own problems. We must give back to the homeless individual responsibility for his or her own life.
2. Homelessness is a community issue.
There’s room for anyone who wants to be of service in support of our community’s work to end homelessness.
We must discern ways to channel our people’s and our community’s energy and resources in the direction of the long-term solution: ending homelessness, not just managing it.
3. Collaboration and good communication are critical among service providers.
We must support each other as we work to end chronic homelessness. Different agencies bring complementary strengths to the table, and we need to find ways to leverage those strengths without duplicating our efforts.
In order for that to work, we must have excellent communication between agencies.
Going Forward
The Roundtable will continue to meet periodically to move this discussion forward. We invite your relevant scomments and questions. You can make those by commenting on this website, or by contacting us.