Preface: A note on the context in which homeless service providers and Joint Office staff do their work
Homelessness is a crisis occurring across the United States and is a highly politicized and contentious issue. The Joint Office of Homeless Services’ (Joint Office) staff do their work in the context of this charged climate. One Joint Office staff person we spoke with told us that they do not tell people where they are employed or what they do for a living because of public criticism.
During the audit, we connected with Joint Office staff through interviews and a survey that we created. Many Joint Office staff shared feedback about the challenges of dealing with public criticism amid working in a long-term crisis, including the pressure to solve the root causes of homelessness. As a Joint Office staff person who responded to our survey said,
“JOHS [Joint Office] staff and service providers are some of the most dedicated, hard working people on the planet. The man-made economic and social disaster of homelessness is 24/7 for these folks. The pandemic made it all that much harder. Homeless services are the catch-all for the failures of all of our other systems (education, healthcare, justice, human services, employment, benefits, housing, etc.), and the direct effects of racism, ableism, heterosexism, transphobia, ageism, etc. Yet homeless services departments are often blamed for not solving it. It is not JOHS sole responsibility to end the racial and economic forces that create the conditions of poverty in Multnomah County, and JOHS is often blamed for it anyway. Adequately responding to our housing crisis will require major shifts in all the systems listed above to actively address the impacts of racism and oppression. This is our collective responsibility.”
We recognize the difficulty in trying to provide services within this context. Our intention is to provide critical feedback in this audit report that ultimately supports Joint Office staff and contracted providers in their work.
Report highlights
The Joint Office of Homeless Services is a partnership between Multnomah County and the City of Portland to house and shelter people experiencing homelessness. Homeless service providers told us that the Joint Office has been a confusing and chaotic organization. We talked with providers in the spring of 2022 during the planning phase of our audit, surveyed them in the fall of 2022, and interviewed representative providers in each system in 2023. Consistently across these points in time, providers reported that contract management and communication need improvements. The number of Joint Office staff has grown tremendously in the last few years and the growing pains of this expansion have been felt by both providers and staff.
- Each homeless system (adult, youth, family, domestic/sexual violence survivors, and veterans) worked in a silo with minimal communication with other systems.
- We found that the Joint Office did not consistently pay providers on time. We appreciate that staff have made their invoice review process more thorough.
- Homeless service providers expressed frustration with a lack of timely and complete contracts. Also, the Joint Office had been relying on another department for assistance.
- Program Specialists/Program Specialist Seniors have a conflict of interest; they are both the primary advocates for homeless service providers and also the ones who hold them accountable for meeting performance measures.
- Performance measures are an important way to ensure that homeless services are efficient and equitable. Staff had a lot of latitude to change performance measures when providers were unable to meet them.
- Not all homeless service providers and Joint Office staff were aware of the Joint Office’s strategic vision.
- Fewer than half of homeless service providers surveyed felt the Joint Office was doing a good job communicating policies and system goals.
- Providers submitted equity plans, but Joint Office staff did not review them, which was a missed opportunity for improving equity among service providers.
What we recommend
- Joint Office management should schedule regular communication among homeless service systems.
- To improve timely payments to providers, staff should adjust their process so that they review payments in question, but do not prevent the rest of the invoice from being processed.
- Joint Office management should hire a contract management specialist to oversee the process.
- Joint Office management should modify the Program Specialist role so that this conflict of interest is eliminated.
- To ensure fairness among providers, Joint Office management should create criteria that must be met in order to change performance measures.
- Joint Office executive management needs to communicate their strategic vision.
- Joint Office management should ensure they send regular communications to service providers to address policies and goals.
- Joint Office management should ensure that Joint Office staff are trained on how to review equity plans and should review equity plans submitted by providers.
Why we did this audit
We began this audit due to concerns about the Joint Office incorrectly reporting how many people were placed in housing. We interviewed homeless service providers about their concerns related to this misreporting of data. During the course of these interviews, significant concerns about silos, communication, contract management, and strategic planning came up. We decided to expand our audit to include these issues.
We also experienced communication issues during this audit that impacted our ability to assess the reliability of the Joint Office’s data. We originally requested a list from the Joint Office of all of the people included in the report Newly Placed in Housing. We wanted to conduct data quality checks. We were told by the Joint Office’s data team that they didn’t have access to this data and that we should speak with the System Administrator for the homeless management information system (HMIS) at the City of Portland, who runs reports for them. When we spoke with the HMIS System Administrator, they told us that they don’t have the data since they run a query (data programming language to pull information) provided by the Joint Office data staff. The query produces a number, not a list of people.
We then asked the Joint Office’s data team to provide us with the query they used to pull data, so we could try to recreate it. We worked to recreate their process with the data we had available to us. We met with the Joint Office data team to evaluate our analysis. The data team reviewed our work and responded by giving us a list of all of the people included in the report, Newly Placed in Housing. This was the data we’d originally requested and that they said they didn’t have.
After months of trying to clarify our data questions with the Joint Office, we decided we would best serve the public interest by not waiting any longer on data requests and issuing two reports – this report focused on the perspectives of homeless services providers and Joint Office staff covering the period from spring 2022 through this past winter – and a second report focused on data reliability, which we will publish as soon as we can complete that work.
Joint Office Response Letter
Read Chair Vega Pederson’s response letter to the Joint Office Audit Report.
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