Home for Holidays meets expectations

The goal was 15 households by Christmas.
The reality will be 16 households — 27 people — in stable housing by New Year’s Day.
You can understand if representatives of the communitywide Home for the Holidays initiative call that a win — particularly when you consider it all started with 50 people brainstorming in the Monongalia County Commission chambers on Nov. 22.
“We’ve followed our existing process that WVCEH has in place to prioritize people and get them hooked up with a case manager and moved into housing,” Rachael Coen, chief programs officer with the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness, said.
“Then the wraparound comes afterwards. So we get you in. We case manage and work with you. We hook you up with the folks from Health Right, with Social Security, with all the things that would be beneficial to keeping someone in housing, long term.”
And while the program will be life-changing for those who are able to use it as a springboard to a new beginning, it also marks a paradigm shift for those providing the services.
Monongalia County Commission President Tom Bloom said that shift can be
boiled down to one word — communication.
“Everybody was already doing these services. The difference this has made is we’ve opened the doors so we can realize, OK, this person’s doing A, this person’s doing B. You continue to do what you do, but now we have coordination of everything,” Bloom said.
“And it works. It does work. I think we even surprised ourselves. When a problem comes up now, everybody gets together and it gets resolved. We just didn’t have that before. I think everybody sees now what we’re able to accomplish.”
Coen said the original concern over landlords not making apartments available never came to fruition, explaining, “The landlords have been great. It’s to the point where we’ve not been able to contact everyone back.
“I think that comes from knowing that we’re just not putting people in units and walking away. There’s case management and a housing stability plan that goes along with this,” she said.
It was explained that donated goods, like furniture, are coming in faster than people can be housed.
“I think that shows you the community is willing to buy into this program. Up until now, we didn’t have that public support, and I think that’s partly on us for not promoting the work that’s being done,” Bloom said.
“Until we started this, I didn’t know everything that Bartlett Housing Solutions has done. It’s unbelievable. Health Right, are you kidding? If it wasn’t for Health Right … But that’s what we didn’t do. We didn’t let people know. We didn’t communicate. That’s been the most powerful thing that’s come out of this.”