So first of all, I want to say thank you for your testimony. Thank you for your expert opinions. I want to -- I know we're pressed for time. I did have one question. You talked a little bit earlier about funding and you talked about the fact that the School District has provided significant funding to be able to address this issue. Can you give us numbers? So prepandemic what type of numbers are you getting? Clearly the pandemic happens. ARPA funding comes down, you're getting more funding. So help us understand what those dollar amounts are so we can begin to think about things from our perspective. And I do also want to thank on top of Valley Youth House, Eddie's House and HopePHL as well too for partnering with us to make this hearing a huge success. Help us out.
I completely echo that. We have to be -- we're better together. So we received zero funds from the School District of Philadelphia. There wasn't this opportunity prior. They operated I think -- and Colleen can provide more information, but on a team smaller than people, right. She said 12 the 15 people were with that 13 expansion, so they're very small, 14 very underresourced department 15 within the School District. So we never got funding from the School District prior. So we had our street outreach program and then our access point through OHS. Street Outreach was RHY, FYSB funding. That allowed us to see the need. So when this came up, they put out an RFP and we applied, because we're like we see all of these people, we know that this is an issue. We also used to prior be in schools more. And since then with our access point, we see so much demand just coming through our doors. Our team struggled with the ability for capacity. We used to serve 1,000 youth a year with three staff. Luckily with the YHP funds we've now more than doubled in size. And then these contracts were months and they're being 15 extended, though the money is not 16 being added, right, because there's 17 no more money left. So what we're 18 asking and have been asking actually the City and the Mayor's Office and Council is for $3 million to replace those funds. And because I -- or the School District, whoever can, but we're calling on everybody. That was the impetus for this hearing.
No, you could call on us. It's fine. I was looking over at the School District because I'm wondering, and you can give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down, is that about the amount of money that you all have been spending in ARPA funding to be able to provide contractual services to organizations like this? It's about $3 million a year?
Chair recog -- real quick, at some point can the District give us in writing how many organizations are able to provide services based on the $3 million a year funding? Is it for 2 nonprofits, 22 nonprofits, whatever those numbers are? I don't expect you to know that right now. But if we can get that information, that'll definitely be beneficial to us.
Oh, so is $1 million for three different organizations?
So I know for -- so keep in mind they're 12 month -- and OHS. So keep in mind 13 they're 18-month contracts. 14
Valley 17 Youth House, HopePHL, Eddie's House 18 and then OHS is also contracted under that amount.
I mean, are there more organizations that do this work that you think that we should be funding or is it just primarily you three?
We would love for there to be more in expansion, but currently that was kind of my point of we're just getting started. This is a historic investment of that $3 million into the School District and it's going away. I understand talking about everything and all the big picture issues, but that's a crisis.
Then we're -- yeah, we have been doing the work in outreach services, Eddie's House. We all have different programs. It'd probably be great for them to get a chance to maybe submit the programs we all do because that allows us to intersect them at different places.
So the Education Committee will be committed to reconvening this conversation prior to us starting budget negotiations next year so we can make sure that this funding gap is at the forefront of the dialogue along with other holes that we found today. And of course we always want to hear the perspective of youth so we begin to move in the direction of providing more sustainable funding and solutions. So I think that that information was extremely important and I want to say thank you for responding to that, and thank you all for giving us the data and the information on your end as well too.
So the ECYEH department currently only receives federal funding. So as a city, as a state we need to leverage that, right. We need to come together to fill the gaps that federal funding can't fill.
I mean, absolutely we agree. Did you want to add something? I seen the --
Yeah. I just wanted to mention one other thing that's in the testimony which is about City shelters. And some of their rules actually undermine the ability of children to get to school and have school stability. I gave two examples of a child who was actually in their last year of 12th grade and they had to actually stay at the shelter for a certain amount of time in order that the family didn't lose housing the next day, so that child ended up accruing significant fees and fines in school as a result, that kind of thing. I mean, that's like low-hanging fruit that we can do some things that actually don't cost money but that were really valuable to children, including the kind of McKinney-Vento screen and also the tools of what resources are available, but it needs to be community-based and it needs to be based upon youth driving this and on children and families who have this experience driving any task force that moves forward.
Yeah, I keep hearing that word task force. I keep hearing task force. I don't know. The creative juices are flowing. Listening to that concern and listening to what the Mayor's Office said that they would do previously, can we assure -- and I so much appreciate the Mayor's team for staying and listening to all of the testimony here today. But I'm hoping that that's another charge that we can kind of put on you guys as it relates to how our homeless shelters operate and some of the rules that are in the homeless shelters that set young people up for failure based on them being forced to stay and attend school and things like that. So thank you all for the thumbs up on that. Chair recognizes Councilmember Gauthier, then Councilmember Lozada. And then I think we can get ready to close out this hearing today.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. In your testimony earlier you said that the majority of young people who are experiencing homelessness, something like 80 percent were not able to serve because they don't meet the housing definition. Can you just say more about what needs to change to fix that? And then you mentioned a law that you were lobbying on. I think that the Education Committee and the Housing Committee would love to maybe do a letter and support you on that. So is it possible --
If you could follow up with the Committee just specifying what exactly that is and how we can be helpful.
Sure. So I can address your first question. So for -- there's three different departments, government departments, that define youth homelessness, Department of Education, Housing and Urban Development and the Family Youth and Service Bureau. I'll define them differently, right. In Philadelphia through the coordinated entry system -- so a lot of people also don't understand how housing works, right, like actual housing programs. We're talking about people moving into transitional housing programs, rapid rehousing programs or permanent supportive housing, essentially everyone goes through what's called a coordinated assessment. So you complete the same assessment based on some demographics, right, if you have a single family youth adult. Then people get put into a pool of people to then get matched to a program based on family size, their vulnerability score, what they've been through. You're only eligible for a housing assessment if you meet the specific HUD definition of homelessness, which is place not meant for human habitation, staying in a shelter or fleeing domestic violence and sometimes other -- we have like meetings where we talk about the nuances like these are people we can't really define situations, right, they're very dynamic, so there are other forms of violence occasionally. It's very difficult because it assumes that homelessness is linear, right. And for young people it's not. You don't lose a job and then you're homeless until you're not anymore. They're moving around. We have youth on the street for two weeks. Then they might find an aunt to stay with for two months, right. And then kind of the cycle hits again, but they're never quite reaching that stability. But in that kind of HUD definition and what our housing programs and access to those housing programs are based off of it does, which is really difficult. There is some expanded eligibility underneath the YHP funds, though it's not fully implemented within our system. So as an access point, we complete those housing assessments. Our street outreach team also has mobile assessors and they complete those housing assessments. So if you're a family that double up or overcrowded, you wouldn't qualify. The homeless prevention resources in our city have also -- as I talk about another COVID funding cliff, has completely gone away, where I know OHS had funding for three months and it was all gone because of the need. I know Jamie. Thank you to you, Councilmember, for advocating for I think $19 million in rental assistance. And I'd love to be in conversation on how that can help, but right now it's dry. There's nothing and there hasn't been for a while. So it's very difficult. Those families are experiencing instability and on the brink of street and shelter homelessness, right. We've talked at length about the concerns. But there's not actual housing intervention for them.
I think one -- well, I wanted to just credit almost -- basically the whole crew up here for advocating on the rental assistance. But I just wanted to understand what we need to do. Does it take an act of Congress? Is this like an administrative change that --
That's above my pay grade. No, I have some ideas. But I do think logistically and legally Beth Gonzalez would probably be the best one to answer that. I think what we do as a community if we can't change federally is we get additional dollars to supplement the work that they're doing so we can create an actual continuum, right. So we use City dollars. We get whatever it is, right. We kind of pull and get that blended funding so we can have if somebody's experiencing here in all those different categories all the way through, okay, someone's housed. Sometimes those rapid rehousing programs are only one year. We see them return. We then need to -- Shani speaks a lot at Valley House, what about the road to 30, like we're thinking bigger picture, what about longer term subsidies. Majority of people in this age range who have privilege live with their family still. There have been studies that have come out, right. They're not expected to live on their own and pay $1,400 a month rent. So there's a lot of issues that I think we could probably talk about all day, but I do think that that's one, at least something aside from kind of the legal congress federal stuff I think that we can try to do in our city, right, if we come together.
Thank you, Councilwoman. And to close us out, Chair recognizes Councilmember Lozada.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you all for being with us today. Thank you for the work that you do consistently. We saw how you impact some of our youth that are vulnerable so I just wanted to say thank you. My question though is you mentioned a database, and we've talked a lot about a database that would be able to serve as a central point so that we know who is the client that we're serving, what is the need and how many doors have been knocked on before we've been able to truly address and help connect them to the resources that they need. Have you heard of other states that are able to -- the response that we get when we're talking about these shared databases is that there are certain laws that prevent us from cross- departmentally to be able to share this information. Do you know of other states that have been able to successfully share data with one another that really gets people connected to the services?
So it happens at the state level and it happens at the City level. We always hear that, right, you can't share them. So you have a memorandum of understanding that allows certain level --
I'm sorry. You have an MOU, memorandum of understanding, that delineates what access each agency has. So, for example, in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County they have 5 independent data elements that are 6 in one system. It is fed by School 7 District of Pittsburgh -- 8 Pittsburgh Public, excuse me. It 9 is also fed by their homelessness 10 agency, DHS, and it's alcoholism. 11 It's a whole group that feeds into 12 it. And then the data that they 13 have access to is limited so that 14 the School District cannot see all 15 the records of the parent and all 16 of those types of things. But it's 17 an integrated system that allows 18 you to get a tremendous amount of 19 data about what's working and what 20 is not working. 21 So they can look at their truancy programs and say, are those kids staying in school, is it really having an impact. And they can have that data come back, who are the kids who are most impacted by a program that we're piloting in X school, et cetera. So they're able to get that information and have it drive their decision- making.
And I think in addition to being able to collect that data is us trying to figure out, right, are we actually serving 200 children or are we serving 1,000 children and how many doors have been knocked on and what was the exact need that they came in requesting and how successful were we at being able to address that need, right, and then how much money is it costing us to be able to get that person to (inaudible), right, if they need services beyond that 24, right. Do you really need to be able to continue to provide the Continuum of Care services in order to really get them to independently move out of depending on different systems, right. For some reason every time we talk to each other in government, there's always a barrier that prevents us from being able to share information. But I think that if we're going to truly be able to see who are these individuals who are depending on the different resources that we have available, we have to figure out how we go beyond the barriers and able to share information. And if it's as simple as an MOU, then I can't understand why we are creating such a huge issue around, right, whether it's the School District, Office of Homeless Services, you know, DHS, the shelters. All of these things I think are -- all of these groups or entities that should be able to share information so we know who's knocking on our door.
I think the issue is that we're also getting, you know, you're building an infrastructure for an issue that of notification this family needs this resource, are you able to serve this child, that kind of thing. But you have to have an investment of an integrated data system, right, so that might be a federal grant, that might be something like that to actually build it so that everyone is using the same data system. So it is a big change, it's a big investment, but I think it's worth it.
Do you know the name of the data system that, for example, Pittsburgh uses or some of the other examples that you gave --
That would be great if you get that to my office. I really appreciate that.
I appreciate it. I know I thanked you guys a number of times for staying, but can that also be something that we kind of think about in next year's budget, looking at the possibility of maybe putting out an RFP to have one system to be able to track folks the way other municipalities do. I think that that's a good charge for us. Thank you, Councilmember Lozada. We appreciate it. With that being said, are there any other -- oh, I'm sorry. With that being said, I want to thank the members of this panel for your patience and coming -- (Applause.)
Are there any other questions or comments from members of the Committee? (No response.)
There being no further questions or comments from members of the Committee and no other witnesses to testify, I will ask if anyone else present in this hearing today whose name I failed to call wish to offer any testimony, please speak up now. (No response.)
Amazing. Hearing none, I want to thank everybody for participating in such an important conversation today. All of the witnesses, all of the panelist, all the guests here today, thank PYB for hosting us. If you didn't hear earlier, my camp will be here the week of August 19th so I'm super excited about that. But of course, thank you to the members of the Education Committee, their staff as well as the Council President's Office and the Tech team for allowing us to do this remote hearing today. I want to note for the record that we're going to recess this hearing, right. We're going to recess this hearing so we can call this hearing back into action before the calendar year is over so we can see what progress has been made and what we would do moving forward. So the hearing is now recessed. Thank you, everybody. Have a great rest of the day. (Committee on Education concluded at 3:35 p.m.) C E R T I F I C A T I O N I, hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence noted are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me in the foregoing matter, and that this is a correct transcript of the same. __________________________________ TANEHA CARROLL