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After launching a county-wide Continuum of Care coordination hub, staff were saving time almost immediately.
Middlesex County, New Jersey takes a notably client-centered approach to homelessness response — one built on tight collaboration across a wide network of case managers, street outreach teams, and partner agencies. Case management teams from across the CoC come together regularly to discuss clients and surface ideas, and that cross-agency dialogue is where much of the county's progress originates.
"We have all of these amazing people across agencies coming out and bringing new ideas back to us," said Michelle Grabelle, Homeless Programs Supervisor in the county's Division of Housing, Community Development & Social Services. "Having all these people who are dedicated to the work, on their own and bringing it back to the collective, is what helps us move forward."
That collaborative model is the county's strength — but it also creates a coordination challenge. With funding flowing through three distinct streams (HUD's CoC program, the state's SSH program, and the county's homelessness trust fund) and partner agencies spread across the county, keeping everyone aligned had become a constant exercise in forwarding emails and tracking down the latest version of a document.
Middlesex County first encountered Civic Roundtable at a conference and began conversations with the team shortly after. When the county decided to move forward, the deployment moved at a pace that's rare in government technology.
"We had a timeline for how we wanted to start, and we were lucky that the county really allowed us to drive with this," Grabelle said. "We were able to move quickly on our end, and the Roundtable team was more than willing to meet our aggressive pace to get their platform deployed.”
The team launched the main page in March. Within two months, 110 members had joined and were actively posting and interacting. By April, the team had shifted to building out subspaces for case managers and other subcommittees. "The ease of the program has allowed us to sit with it and create new value," Grabelle said. "Public servants across the board are engaging in Roundtable, it’s great to see."
That speed-to-value matters. In a sector where technology rollouts can take a year or more before users meaningfully adopt them, Middlesex County had a working, populated, multi-space community in roughly 60 days.
For Grabelle, the return on Roundtable comes down to one thing: time.
"I send out a lot of information. I get info from agencies, too. When all that information is in Roundtable, it’s easy to find," she said. Instead of partners scrolling through hundreds of emails trying to remember which thread contained a policy update or resource link, the information lives in a searchable, organized space. Meeting minutes have their own folder. Quick links and high-priority items are pinned. Anyone can go in and find the latest information.
"The time-saving aspect of it is what it really comes down to. It's money well spent for our agencies and for us. I don't have people constantly saying, 'Hey, can you send me this again?' They can just find it."
Grabelle estimates she's already saving a few hours a week, even early in the rollout — and expects that figure to grow significantly as more partners become comfortable posting and self-serving information.
Members across Middlesex County are already using Roundtable to scale their ability to connect needs with solutions: one recent thread served as an informal marketplace where partners offered chairs, patio furniture, and other items to share across the network where furniture demand is a constant need.
At Roundtable, we understand that a platform that takes a year to deploy is a tool that's costing time and money before it saves any. Middlesex County's CoC built a working coordination hub during a window where a constantly changing federal funding landscape made communication even more critical to their efforts to reduce homelessness. They did it without sacrificing the quality of the rollout, and they did it with a partner network that's genuinely engaged.
Public servants deserve technology infrastructure built for the way they work.
"The team of people who are doing this are so dedicated. They're so excited to work more collaboratively," Grabelle said. "We wouldn't be reaching our goals if it weren't for our people. They're willing to try something new. It’s the best team.”
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