La Crosse, WI
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Pathways Home
PATHWAYS HOME PRESENTATION JANUARY 2024
The city and county have identified a need for a sustainable, data-driven and coordinated response to homelessness. At present, homelessness response is often fragmented and lacks clear goals. This plan will pool resources, learn from what has worked elsewhere, and have accountable leadership.
Pathways Home was presented to a joint meeting of La Crosse County Board and City of La Crosse Common Council on Monday, Jan. 8, and implementation of the plan has begun.
What does Functional Zero mean?
Functional Zero is a benchmark used by many other communities to effectively end homelessness by preventing homelessness whenever possible, and ensuring it’s rare, brief and only happens one time if it does occur.
For our community, it would mean the number of people experiencing homelessness never exceeds our capacity to move people into permanent housing.
Community agencies working on homelessness in our city and county will be an integral part of the plan. Input from those organizations has helped and will continue to inform this process. We believe everyone will benefit from the greater coordination offered by this new approach under the city and county’s leadership
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CONTACTS:
Brian Sampson, City of La Crosse Homeless Services Coordinator at sampsonb@cityoflacrosse.org or Isaac Hoffman, La Crosse Area Family Collaborative Director at ihoffman@lacrossecounty.org.
Key Data Points
Update September 2023
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The individuals served: 93 percent of individuals served in the Coulee Coalition in 2022 were either last exited from a Wisconsin program or were first time enrollees in the system.
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In 2022, 47 individuals were last served in another Wisconsin coalition before coming to the Coulee Coalition.
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The state of Wisconsin is made up of 24 coalitions whose membership is comprised of agencies who serve, support and care about those experiencing homelessness. A coalition is often several counties in a geographic area, and our Coulee Coalition includes La Crosse, Monroe, Vernon and Crawford counties.
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At least 115 people housed from the system from January to May of 2023.
City of La Crosse - La Crosse County
Initiative
UPDATE TO COMMON COUNCIL- September 2023
The City and County have been working on selecting a design process and creating a Stakeholder Engagement Blueprint to create the five-year plan to address homelessness in La Crosse. Planning the actual revamped Homeless Response System has not started yet, and will begin at the end of September with the Core System Work Teams.
Our goal is to have a completed five-year plan by the end of 2023, begin implementing in early 2024, and enter the maintenance phase in 2025 and beyond.
There will be three Core System Work Teams where most of the proposed solutions and action plans will come out of: Prevention, Crisis Response, and Outflow. Those three categories make up the Homeless Response System from households who are at risk of entering homelessness (Prevention) to providing services or shelter if someone does become homeless (Crisis Response) to helping people exit to permanent housing situations with appropriate wraparound services (Outflow).
Those three Core System Work Teams will be primarily comprised of agencies and service providers with direct knowledge and experience providing services in their respective areas. They will have three meetings, facilitated by Heather Quackenboss at UW Extension, from September to November that will result in strategies, initiatives, and action steps they would like in the final plan.
Those recommendations will go to both the Lived Experience Team (a group of people who have experienced homelessness, but are now stable and in housing) and to the City/County Coordinating Team. Our Coordinating Team will put the final plan and recommendations together with priorities and proposed strategies to tie those solutions to funding available through all levels in the community and send it to the Mayor and County Administrator for approval.
There are also other stakeholder groups in the community that we will be engaging and communicating with on a different level. They are important groups and might not want to be engaged in the deep-diving conversations about solutions. We will have a customized way of meeting with each of those groups to solicit solutions from and to keep up to date about how the process is playing out.
-- Brian Sampson, City of La Crosse
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What does it mean to be homeless?
A story. Let's call him Ben.
Ben is in his mid-20s and he became homeless for the first time in January 2023. He had been staying in a hotel. He had income and a savings account. Ben's circumstances began to change.
Too embarrassed to reach out for help to his family and local service providers, he found a place “off the grid” to pitch a tent. Ben was a former Boy Scout so he used those skills to survive outside. When we met him, he was visibly shaking due to his anxiety. He said used alcohol sometimes because, he was "so scared all of the time."
Ben was willing to work with those who could help him. As long as they would come to him. He was afraid of losing his stuff if he left his spot.
Ben eventually got connected with other people who were homeless. He told us that these people were the only ones he felt wouldn’t judge him.
A week after we met him for the first time, his camp was cleared out and he had to move. He had created a plan with the outreach team about how to apply for housing and other services on our first visit, but we couldn’t find him after he moved from his spot. We did find him about a month later and we were able to help him apply for housing.
Even five months later, Ben is still working on finding a home due to the lack of housing in our community.
Ben's story is all too familiar in La Crosse.
"We want La Crosse to remember that these are our neighbors and people who are from our community that we are trying to help," said City of La Crosse Homeless Services Coordinator Brian Sampson.