Abstract
Yolo County’s Homeless and Poverty Action Coalition (HPAC) is the collaborative body that coordinates and applies for Continuum of Care Program grant funding for homeless housing and services in its region. For the past two scoring rounds, fiscal year (FY) 2012 and FY 2013, the HPAC has obtained a score below the national average. In order to maintain funding for their projects and potentially obtain funding for bonus projects in the future, the HPAC needs to improve its score. Since the grant program does not supply Continuums of Care with a justification for the scores they receive, I conducted an evaluation of the application of the HPAC in order to determine how they might increase their grant score through improved alignment with the grant scoring criteria. For this analysis, I compared the application responses of the HPAC to the scoring criteria for the FY 2013-FY 2014 Continuum of Care Program competition to detect potential deficiencies that resulted in their reduced score. Based on the evaluation of the HPAC’s responses, I identified four categories of recommendations. I recommend that the HPAC fully implement and utilize their Homeless Management Information System and Coordinated Entry system, improve some of their planning and procedures, increase permanent housing in their region, and provide more detail on their Continuum of Care application.