Coordinating rural homelessness services across Oregon

On January 10, 2023, Governor Tina Kotek declared homelessness a state of emergency in Oregon. In the two years since, the Governor has issued a flurry of executive orders, expanding geographic areas included in the emergency. Today, Oregon Housing and Community Services (OHCS) carries the mantle, working to help everyone in Oregon experiencing homelessness.

“Solving” homelessness is a generational problem and it’s easier said than done.

“Areas of the state that have seen homelessness rise the fastest created ‘multi-agency coordination’ groups,” including “Local Planning Groups [that] have been established in all geographic regions of the Balance of State to improve the coordination and engagement of homelessness services providers” (OPB.org).

Because homelessness touches so many municipal agencies, from public health to law enforcement to housing agencies like OHCS, coordination between disparate government agencies and partner organizations like non-profits is non-negotiable.

Until the challenge of interagency coordination is conquered, passionate public servants like Kay Brooks, a policy and program analyst for OHCS, remain hamstrung and unable to dedicate all their energy on their mission. For Brooks, that’s homelessness.

“I experienced housing instability growing up and faced significant challenges in my early 20s,” Brooks told us. “I grew tired of appealing to policymakers who didn’t seem to understand the complexities of homelessness. So, I decided to become a policymaker myself.”

But when working with different organizations across rural Oregon, working to oversee and distribute funding allocations to tackle homelessness, Brooks saw in others what she herself had experienced: Public servants were constantly bifurcating between “the work to do the work and the work,” as she put it. Everyone was duplicating work because “multi-directional” communication between municipal government agencies and state agencies and federal agencies and non-profits and local shelters run by two people and advisors and everyone else involved in helping people experiencing homelessness was manual. Public servants would email a listserv, hoping the right person sees it and can share the resources needed or answer their question. If not, they were stuck.

Beyond that, Brooks explained that while skill specialization is important, “the pendulum has swung too far. Everyone is working in siloes because of a lack of integration.” She continued: “Every division within government agencies has its own systems. There’s no central distribution network to enhance visibility, let alone any functional way to find resources like grant information. The decentralization of resources results in a lot of duplicative work.”

The work to do the work, indeed. And that’s where Roundtable comes into play.

Unfortunately, homelessness is often not thought of as a rural challenge. Rural continuums of care, like the organizations tackling homelessness in rural Oregon, are resource starved. States spend, on average, between 0.27% to 0.34% of their budget on homelessness, meaning these organizations must do more with less.

Technologically, the most advanced tool many of these organizations are working with is something akin to Microsoft Teams — which is to say, they are technology poor. In 2025, solving intractable community challenges that involve dozens of disparate organizations requires technology. Like collaboration, it’s non-negotiable.

One partner told us “There are so many different programs out there. I want a way to quickly see how others are managing similar challenges; a search feature that lets me filter out all the noise.” Another said “I spend too much time tracking down the right contacts or the right resources; it’d be helpful if all that information was in one central place and easy to find.” Brooks put it succinctly: “The decentralization of resources results in a lot of duplication” because each government agency has its own Sharepoint, Teams chat, website, and information repositories that don’t talk to each other.

So when OHCS deployed Roundtable in accordance with Governor Kotek’s directives to support all the organizations working on homelessness in rural Oregon — federal, state and local government agencies, non-profits, tribal organizations, local planning groups, and community action agencies — those problems were solved.

Today, more than 60 organizations, including OHCS, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, NeighborWorks Umpqua, the Oregon Health Authority, Oregon Department of Human Services, the Blue Earth Federal Corporation, Re!nstitute, and more have joined Roundtable, and it’s clear that Oregon is making progress.

Roundtable’s government operations platform represents a step-change in technological capabilities for these organizations. From department leaders to a volunteer at a homeless shelter in rural Oregon, public servants are easily able to find the resources they need to do their jobs, identify the peers who can answer their questions, and ultimately be more efficient and effective. A handful of volunteers running a homeless shelter have access to the same grant information and trainings as the largest-involved government agencies, rendering the opportunity cost to do a training or sit down and apply for a grant moot.

“I’m a big believer in the collective braintrust. The more knowledge you have the better,” Brooks told us. “Roundtable is an additional form of capital. We use the platform to increase capacity, capital, and accessibility.”

“Ultimately,” Brooks said, “Roundtable enables us to improve service delivery and help people in rural communities across Oregon.”

We’re committed to empowering public servants at OHCS and across Oregon to focus on serving their communities. Find out what we can do for you.