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Liz Mosier, Director of Special Initiatives, told us CARES of New York is special because “we know homelessness is everywhere, and it looks different everywhere. Homelessness is different in Albany than it is in New York City than it is in Franklin and Essex County.”
CARES of New York is a non-profit organization that oversees 12 Continuums of Care across 34 counties, from the south of Albany to the Canadian border. Its work ranges from managing grant funding, providing program data, overseeing several coordinated entry processes and programs, community planning, serving as admins for the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), and more. All told, CARES of New York geographically covers approximately 65% of New York State.
With a broad geographic responsibility comes geographically distributed public servants, from the “boots on the ground” working with the homelessness population to city and state elected officials.
“We used to use huge listservs to coordinate,” said Mosier. “I was invited to a meeting the other day and it had a thousand people included!” It was becoming a “little overwhelming” with the same information also repeated across each jurisdiction’s own listservs.
Too often, the messages weren’t even reaching the right people. “One of the biggest hurdles I would find,” explained Mosier “is high turnover in agencies.” A typical email to a thousand people would often result in some coming back as undeliverable. That created “a lot of work keeping the listservs clean, making sure that when people are leaving agencies that those emails are being deleted from those list.”
That ongoing maintenance of spreadsheets of emails — ended once CARES of New York deployed Roundtable. “Roundtable is easy to use and communicate with the right people involved in a project.”
Mosier explained that Roundtable is closing the loop between members of the legislature and frontline service providers. Elected officials use Civic Roundtable to understand the status of a project. They don't have to wait for that listserv of email that comes every couple of months.”
And it’s empowering and motivating for frontline public servants when “the mayor’s office likes or comments on the work they’re doing. They’re being recognized.” Moreover, Mosier said, “they can share highlights in real time. We had one individual who had his legs amputated and was without a home for more than five years. We helped him find an apartment and find care, and Roundtable is an avenue for them to share the good that is happening across New York.”
The same is true for public servants. “They don’t need to email me anymore,” Mosier said with a laugh. “They can pop into Roundtable and see what’s happening in real time.”
By connecting service providers, Roundtable is also helping CARES of New York’s get key resources to workers faster. Public servants often reach out to their networks for information about available resources, like furniture vouchers. Mosier explained, “They can go right in and search the term furniture, and the tagging mechanism in Roundtable makes it so easy for them to pull up all of the information that’s been shared.”
Fast answers like this improve the service provider effectiveness and their quality of life. “That has saved them so much time. They don’t have to remember the name of the agency that they have to go to for those referrals” or the location. “They just have to put in a simple word and it pulls it all up like a Google search.”
Ultimately, Mosier explained, Roundtable is one piece of the puzzle that enables her and the CARES of New York team to treat everyone experiencing homelessness with “love, care, and attention.”
Watch the entire video with Liz Mosier here.
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