Evaluating models for homeless outreach and housing placement coordination utilizing the Central Referral System in Chicago

The Central Referral System (CRS) is a centralized database utilized in Chicago, Illinois, in which homeless individuals and families enroll to be eligible for a Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) unit. Outreach Coordination seeks to organize and utilize the City of Chicago’s mobile outreach teams to assist homeless households as they are selected from CRS until they reach PSH. The Center for Housing and Health (CHH) designed two pilot outreach coordination models to identify and house clients selected from the CRS:

• Model 1. Housing coordinators identify clients from the CRS and refer them to an outreach provider, who locates and engages them, and attempts to link them with a housing provider.
• Model 2. Housing providers identify clients from the CRS and only refer them for outreach coordination if they are unable to engage clients directly.

A mixed methods analysis consisting of quantitative and qualitative evaluations of these models were conducted to determine the efficacy of each model. At the end of the yearlong pilot, Model 1 had identified 162 clients from the CRS, engaged 142, and housed 74 with partnering providers.  Model 2 received 49 referrals from housing providers for outreach assistance, engaged 21, and housed 2 with partnering providers. While Model 1 is more resource intensive, it was more successful compared to Model 2 due to the automatic engagement by an outreach team. These models can be adapted to other central referral databases for homeless and housing services.