Letter of Interest Response to All Home Technical Assistance Announcement

August 2017

Brief description of your organization, firm or business

Julie McFarland Consulting is a sole proprietorship owned by Julie McFarland that supports communities in

building efficient and effective homeless service systems. Julie began contracting nationally in June 2017

after working for nearly a decade as a housing provider and providing technical assistance to communities

through the Consulting and Training team at CSH for three years. Current projects are focused on building

and/or enhancing coordinated entry (CE) systems within frontier, rural, and urban communities, and

supporting communities to align with best and emerging practices that move the needle on homelessness.

Just Consulting, LLC is a sole proprietorship owned by Matthew Price that offers grant management

expertise, and experience in youth development programming. Since 2012, Matthew Price has managed

federal national intermediary youth mentoring grants from the DOJ (Department of Justice) totaling $5MM

and provided training and technical assistance to 44 sub-grantees.

Your interest in participating in the system transformation efforts underway in Seattle/King County

Between 2009-2015, Julie was a housing provider in King County, overseeing programs including outreach,

employment, emergency shelter, transitional housing, rapid re-housing and permanent supportive housing

programs for families and young adults. Julie also led the team charged with launching and operating CE for

families and young adults. As a former housing provider and current technical assistance provider in King

County, Julie has tremendous interest in seeing our community reduce our inflow of new people entering the

homeless system, increase our permanent housing (PH) rate, and greatly reduce the community queue of

people experiencing homelessness across the county by supporting safe, PH connections. While there is

much work to do to obtain our ultimate goal of making homelessness rare, brief and one time, there are many

opportunities to improve our system for people experiencing homelessness, including support for housing

providers who are doing this work on the ground. It is common for providers to be asked to do more with

less. In particular, King County is focused on improving our system for the most vulnerable people in our

community, living in shelters and places that are not meant for human habitation. This shift places additional

challenges and stress on providers. Between local experience as a provider, national technical assistance

experience, knowledge of best and emerging practices, community examples and connections to providers

who are moving the needle, this opportunity to support providers through major systems change is a great fit.

Julie and Matthew are responding to this opportunity in partnership because both believe this work presents

unique challenges and receiving support from two people with diverse experience and expertise is more

effective than one person with one perspective. Julie’s experience is rooted in homeless system work and

Matthew offers a perspective on performance measurement and change management from other systems that

homeless providers can learn from and replicate.

Summary of relevant expertise: trends in homeless housing efforts, homeless housing operations, non-

profit management, data analysis

Detail regarding Julie’s experience is embedded within several questions. Julie led a team through significant

system transformation, as the lead entity for CE, experiencing zero staff turnover in the initial 1.5 years of

CE implementation and maintaining strong community relationships.

As a technical assistance provider for over 20 communities in the last three years, the focus of support has

mirrored what the Seattle/King County Continuum of Care is aiming to address:

Increased rates of participant exits to PH through appropriate matching processes (the right

intervention for the right person) and strong services that support sustained housing

Reduced lengths of stay of program participants where appropriate (ex: emergency shelter)

Reduced rates of returns to homelessness after program participants have exited the project

through provision of strong supportive services and landlord relationships

Increased occupancy through CE process, efficient intake processes, and few project level barriers

Increased proportion of people entering the project from homelessness by focusing on the most

vulnerable people living in places not meant for human habitation and emergency shelter

Matthew recently completed his Master’s degree in Nonprofit Leadership from Seattle University. For his

Practicum project, Matthew designed and implemented a diversity, equity, and inclusion audit (document

review, staff survey, data analysis (Qualtrics), and written recommendations) of a local nonprofit. Matthew

researched, interviewed, and wrote his Capstone project on barriers that boards experience when creating a

racially inclusive nonprofit environment.

As grant manager, Matthew used data inputted by subgrantees and collected by a third party (Search

Institute) to assess the impact of youth mentoring. Matthew analyzed the increase of developmental assets in

youth and parsed data by duration of match, race, and population youth (refugee, parenting/pregnant, urban,

etc.) During the current grant, we will analyze the impact of the trauma-informed mentoring model by

comparing both the average asset increase per youth between grant periods at specific organizations and

using qualitative data from mentor survey responses.

Summary of expertise and experience in practices that promote racial equity

As a Caucasian woman, Julie is aware of the privilege and opportunity she has experienced based on her race

throughout her life. She grew up in rural Montana, where about 8% of the population is Native American and

nearly 90% is white. While she participated in many courses, trainings and cultural events, it was not until

CE was launched in King County that Julie became hyper aware of widespread, institutional injustices in

housing and shifted her role to be an active participant in race and social justice efforts.

Julie currently engaged in a project with King County’s Coordinated Entry and Assessment (CEA) team in

which referral and case conferencing practices are being analyzed. Julie has participated in multiple

conversations in which racial inequity issues arise and is discussing methodology to track these issues and

develop recommendations for a public dashboard that would be reviewed during weekly case conferencing

meetings with key homeless system providers and funders, in addition to a deeper data dive monthly to

analyze trends, improvements and ongoing challenges and racial inequities. Specific to equal access issues,

there is a need to improve housing access for people of color and that includes collecting and analyzing data

on who completes assessments with staff from culturally specific organizations (ex: Chief Seattle Club, El

Centro de la Raza) and their responses to interest in culturally specific service questions (ex: Are you

interested in services tailored to people identifying as Native American?) compared to answers provided at

non-culturally specific entities like Regional Access Points. The assumption is that people completing

assessments with culturally specific organizations are expressing interest in culturally specific services more

frequently than at non-culturally specific access points, which may limit service access to non-culturally

specific options because people must opt in to be considered for specialized services. Therefore, there may

be a disparity when people access our homeless system at non-culturally specific access points and we need

to develop and implement a response to that disparity to address equal access and assessor training, leading

to consistency in culturally specific responses regardless of where people access the system.

Matthew is aware of his privilege as a Caucasian male. Specifically to racial justice, the social justice

curriculum of the MNPL program at Seattle University and the 2-day Undoing Institutional Racism by the

People’s Institute how I perpetuate systemic racism and my role in undoing systemic racism. Furthermore, I

began to put this understanding into practice through the practicum and capstone projects of my Master’s

degree. While I would never characterize myself as an expert in the field, I feel confident asking questions of

leaders about how their organizational design perpetuates injustices including those they espouse to

ameliorate.